class j ^Xw ms 

Book. Jt^l 

Gopyiight^l 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



NATION 
BUILDERS 

A Story 

By 

EDGAR MAYHEW BACON 

Member of the American Historical Association 
AND (THE LATE) 

ANDREW CARPENTER WHEELER 




NewYork: EATON & MAINS 
Cincinnati: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

DEC 16 1905 

c Copyright Entry 
CLASS <x XXc. No. 

I 3 3 4 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 1905, by 
EATON & MAINS. 



PREFACE 



The plan of writing an appreciation of the itin- 
erant preachers of Methodism, who went out to 
possess the American frontier a century ago, was 
suggested by the late Andrew Carpenter Wheeler, 
well known by his pen name, /. P. Mowbray. 

Together we had been attracted to this field, 
which investigation showed to have been generally 
neglected by historians. Mr. Wheeler, who was 
the son of Methodist parents, in later life developed 
a strong impulse of filial veneration for the genius 
and achievement of his father's church. Unhappily, 
he did not live to complete the plan that was com- 
menced with a keen literary zest and the ardor of 
an affectionate impulse ; but, fortunately, he prepared 
a reminiscent chapter relating to Henry Bascom, 
and some pages that have been incorporated with 
other material in the present work. 

Although not claiming the same close affiliation 
with the Methodist Church as did my greatly loved 
associate, I have endeavored, with an earnest and 
reverent spirit, to carry out alone the purpose which 
we formed together. 

Edgar Mayhew Bacon. 
Tarrytown, New York, 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Introductory 7 

II. Along a Blazed Trail 29 

III. The Field 52 

IV. Some of the Sowers 75 

V. From Cabin to Camp Meeting 105 

VI. Frontier Women and Preachers' Wives 127 

VII. Another Company of the Sowers 133 

VIII. A Recollection of Bascom 158 

IX. The Songs of Zion 164 

X. From Small Beginnings 170 

XI. The Methodist Church and the Union 186 

XII. The After- Word 194 



NATION BUILDERS 



CHAPTER I 

Introductory 

The recent practical modification of the itiner- 
ancy, that distinctive and unique feature of the Meth- 
odist Episcopal Church, has closed a very important 
chapter of church history. Let it be frankly said 
that if the chapter had been merely one of denomina- 
tional record this book would never have taken the 
form that it has. The magnificent and unexcelled 
achievements of the Methodist itinerants belong to 
the broader field of general history. Specifically, 
they had to do with the social and practical, not less 
than with the religious, development of an impor- 
tant section of the United States. By keeping alive 
the consciences of men and developing ideals of life 
and character in people who would otherwise have 
been lawless, they made strong and efficient citizens 
of the republic. They influenced national legislation 
by moral force, and put their permanent stamp upon 



8 



Nation Builders 



the character of states. We submit with all confi- 
dence that no institution, no agency, has accom- 
plished more in these directions, and few have done 
so much, as have the itinerant ministry of the Meth- 
odist Episcopal Church. As a molding and govern- 
ing influence, working for righteousness in state as 
well as in church, Methodism stands, historically, in 
the very first rank. 

It would no more be possible to write the history 
of some of our Southern and Western states fairly, 
leaving out Methodism, than to write the story of 
Scotland and omit John Knox, or to eliminate the 
Reformed Church from the history of Holland. If 
we would understand the development of the repub- 
lic from the borders of the original states to the 
Mississippi, between 1800 and 1830, we must study 
the influence of the Methodist itinerant. 

In glancing at the history of Methodism with the 
narrative purpose of dealing mainly with its Amer- 
ican development, it is not necessary to examine into 
its doctrinal peculiarities nor to traverse again the 
much harrowed field of evangelical theology; but it 
is necessary to the purpose of this book to mark as 
clearly as is possible one or two of the distinctive 
features of that movement and to learn if possible 
to what it owed its remarkable initial vigor and 
increase. The history of Methodism presents us 
with a combination of the spiritual and communal 



Introductory 



9 



impulses that was unique. Those impulses were con- 
tributed on the one side by a return to the super- 
natural element, and on the other side to the dem- 
ocratic spirit which came to its aid. Dissimilar as 
the motive powers were, and unsuspected as the alli- 
ance was by John Wesley himself, there is now no 
doubt that his practical application of the doctrine 
of justification by faith and his direct appeal to the 
common people were the joint factors in the estab- 
lishment of a new church, to the ultimate success of 
which his organizing ability and governmental tact 
were to contribute in an extraordinary degree. 

Like other religious movements which owed their 
origin to a protest against ecclesiastical inertia or 
endowed wrongs, it grew into an independent and 
aggressive organization without the lust of power, 
and wholly without the intention or desire of its 
great organizer to detach himself from the parent 
establishment, the Church of England. 

History does not record many more brilliant ex- 
amples of a reformer pushed by overruling events 
against his own preferences and prejudices into a 
stupendous task of reconstruction. Intellectually and 
by choice he was an imperialist, and intensely loyal 
to his king and church. On his religious side he be- 
came in the course of events as stanch a democrat as 
Saint Paul. Shut out of his own church by the stu- 
pidity of institutionalism, he went straight to the 



10 



Nation Builders 



common people, not because he for one moment be- 
lieved that the common people were denied any rights 
even of opinion or action, but because he thought 
they ought to be saved from their sins, and it never 
once occurred to him that in this step he was making 
an alliance with the democratic spirit which was 
already stirring and for which a new continent was 
opening. With an eloquence and logical astuteness 
which, as Macaulay acknowledges, might have made 
him eminent in literature, and with a genius for gov- 
ernment not inferior to that of Richelieu, he gave 
himself to the humble and arduous work of saving- 
souls, and abandoned all honors that his genius 
might have attained. In the words of John Nichols, 
"Instead of being an ornament to literature he was 
a blessing to his age, and instead of being the genius 
of his age he preferred to be the servant of God." 

He believed to the last in the sacraments and tradi- 
tions of the mother church, but in his work he was 
compelled to modify one and abandon the other. He 
never outgrew his reverence and affection for the 
aristocratic prerogatives and the ancient privileges 
of that church, but events made him contravene 
both. 

There is not the slightest evidence that Wesley 
at the beginning of his work contemplated even with 
the eye of imagination the development of a free 
church in a free state, or a self-supporting Chris- 



Introductory 



i i 



tianity of many folds in independent but friendly 
relation to the civil government. Nor is there any 
reason to believe that he ever suspected that his 
doctrinal utterances or his simplified ritual and pop- 
ular appeals were powerful adjuncts to that demand 
for freedom and individual right of judgment and 
experience which was every day becoming more 
manifest in English politics. 

Doctrinally, the tenets of Wesley furnished noth- 
ing absolutely new. That which proved a stumbling- 
block to the Anglican establishment, namely, "justi- 
fication by faith" and "the witness of the Spirit," lie 
more or less conspicuous along the Christian high- 
way from Saint Paul to Anselm and Luther, and 
proclaim themselves in Wyclif and Jonathan Ed- 
wards. But it is very sure that with the exception 
of Saint Paul not one of these eminent men, or a 
score of others in both branches of the Christian 
church, who held at various times that the regen- 
eration of the sinner is a supernatural act of God, 
often instantaneous and always attested by the con- 
sciousness and corroborated by the life, ever made 
such practical application of it or so caught the at- 
tention of the mass of men by a simple and author- 
itative presentment of it as did John Wesley. 

One may sufficiently summarize the whole of 
Wesley's doctrine in the early and familiar phrases : 
"original sin/' "repentance," "regeneration," "justi- 



12 



Nation Builders 



fication by faith," "sanctification," and "the witness 
of the Spirit." The conflict raged for half a century 
around the question of instantaneous conversion and 
regeneration. Wesley stood squarely and invincibly 
to it, and he did this the more efficaciously because 
it was not the result of an induction, but the com- 
manding announcement of a fact in his own experi- 
ence — a fact which he did not hesitate to tell his 
listeners was an attestation from on high within the 
reach of the humblest of them. No one put the 
claim of supernaturalism so insistently and so simply, 
acknowledging flatly that every man could be in 
himself the witness of a miracle. 

In defense of his teaching he wrote : 
"That the conversion of sinners is no miracle is 
new doctrine indeed. So new to me that I never 
heard of it before, either among Protestants or 
Papists. I think a miracle is a work of omnipotence 
wrought by the supernatural power of God. Now, 
if the conversion of sinners to holiness is not such 
a work I cannot tell what it is." 

Wesley was thus corroborating what had been 
said of him with unintentional accuracy by a bitter 
ecclesiastical opponent — he was popularizing the 
miraculous; and this charge, filtered through the 
dense brains of the conforming mobs, early ran into 
that other charge, that the Methodists were in league 
with the Papists. But whatever may have been the 



Introductory 



13 



motive of the first accusation and the ignoble sense 
in which it was made, the fact remains that Wesley 
did popularize the miraculous in the sense that he 
brought the internal evidence and the external fruit 
of it to the common apprehension. 

Of the relation that Wesleyanism bears to its time 
no estimate can be justly made that overlooks this 
return to primitive belief. It is of less account to 
us to know how far the purely human elements and 
influences of excitement and emotional elation col- 
ored and coerced the imagination and judgment of 
the reformers than it is to know that Wesley planted 
himself squarely against the first assaults of atheism 
upon miracles, which assaults were to grow in a later 
philosophy to be the most powerful and insidious 
of arguments against Christianity. It was that de- 
sideratum which Wesley, more than any other man, 
met and answered in a singularly apostolic and sim- 
ple manner. Vital Christianity in England was not 
saved by its doctors and school men. At a divine 
command it arose and walked. It survived the 
assaults of skepticism and the deadening influence 
of sestheticism not by an intellectual advance, but 
by an evangelical return to its supernatural charac- 
ter; and this return was not alone obedient, but 
heroic. Its whole effort was not to furnish dis- 
putants, but witnesses, and the sum total of the 
rejoinder that it made both to the church and to the 



14 



Nation Builders 



philosophy of its time, far from being metaphysical 
or doctrinal, shapes itself into the final and unan- 
swerable reply of the blind man: "Whether he be 
a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, 
that, whereas I was blind, now I see/' 

Whatever may be the later conclusion of a reli- 
gious philosophy with regard to the mysterious 
operation of the mind in what the Methodists call 
a change of heart, there can be no sort of doubt 
as to what John Wesley thought it was, nor 
can there be an)' hesitancy in acknowledging the 
work it accomplished in reanimating a fossilized 
religion. 

What Wesley tried to do was to lift faith from 
a merely moral observance to a positive religious 
experience. Regeneration was an act of God regis- 
tered in the soul quite independently of ceremonial 
or decretal ; and, as God was no respecter of persons, 
this experience was as possible in a coal mine as in 
a cathedral. Old as this declaration may have been 
to the established church, it was, at close range, a 
piece of insufferable effrontery when it was not 
sheer blasphemy. "Sir," said the Bishop of Bristol 
to John Wesley, "this pretense to extraordinary gifts 
of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid 
thing, sir. I advise you to go hence." That nearly 
all the bishops so regarded it, and that some of them 
did not scruple to avail themselves of the prejudice 



Introductory 



15 



and ignorance of their followers to incite brutal 
opposition to Wesley, no one now denies. 

With the usual fatuity of institutionalism, the 
church proceeded to thrust Wesley and his followers 
into an independent and aggressive organization, 
which was to bring about the very relations which 
Wesley deprecated and the church feared. Once 
organized and moving, it w T as very evident that 
Methodism could not exist without either modifying 
the conditions which opposed it or by finding a new 
area for its expansion. It did both. A new evan- 
gelicanism slowly permeated the English church, 
and a new continent opened its broad arms to 
receive it. 1 

The most important and most immediate of the 
temporal influences that led to the organization of 
the Methodist Episcopal Church, and to its inde- 
pendence from the Wesleyan connection in Eng- 
land, w r as the conflict of the colonies with the mother 
country. The spirit of independence w^as, as we 
say, in the air, and must be supposed to have imbued 
not only political, social, and business circles, but to 
have influenced the counsels of religious bodies. 

From the novel spectacle of a free state the minds 

1 "Was it no boon to you that Charles Wesley, the sweet poet of the 
Wesleyan movement, accompanied his brother to this country ? Thus to 
you also was communicated, by strange interpositions of Providence, the 
electric thrill of that awakening which startled the eighteenth century from 
its torpor of indolence and death. "—Farewell Address of Archdeacon Farrar 
in America. 



i6 



Nation Builders 



of men advanced, as by a natural sequence, to the 
contemplation of an independent church— that is, 
a church not only dissociated from state control, but 
also released from a restrictive subservience to a 
foreign ecclesiastical authority. While retaining 
a close paternal relationship with English Wesleyan- 
ism, and abating no jot of reverence and love for its 
great founder, the Methodist Society in America 
began to feel the necessity of a separation in church 
organization. This impulse was greatly strength- 
ened by the departure from America of nearly all 
the English preachers and exhorters of the society 
and the assumption of their work by a number of 
young men of American birth. At one time Francis 
Asbury seems to have been the only Methodist 
preacher of English birth in the thirteen states, and 
Asbury 's sympathies were all American. 

The Presbyterian, Congregational, Dutch Re- 
formed, and several other churches did not suffer 
such depletion in the ranks of their ministry, because 
a larger proportion of their clergy were, either by 
birth or interest, more closely identified with the 
fortunes of the states. Next to the Methodists the 
older branch of the Episcopal Church suffered. The 
shepherds departed, never to return, and their places 
could be filled only by extraordinary means. 

There was a most serious lack of men who by 
ordination were authorized to administer any of the 



Introductory 



17 



rites which conviction and custom prescribe for the 
church. Nor was it possible, without great difficulty 
and sacrifice, to supply this deficiency. Only by 
extraordinary means could the candidate for ordina- 
tion or appointment accomplish his purpose, for in 
all the American world there was no bishop. Such 
aspirants as there were for the Episcopal ministry, 
whether of the conservative establishment or the 
Wesleyan connection, were obliged to go to England 
for ordination. The Archbishop of Canterbury de- 
cided that such applicants must take the oath of 
allegiance to the King of England before being per- 
mitted to preach the gospel of the Kingdom of 
Heaven. That this objection was not an insuperable 
one the continuance of the older branch in America 
has shown ; but the Methodists, left almost without 
ministers, and put to the greatest inconvenience for 
lack of those who were authorized to administer the 
sacraments, to marry, baptize, and bury them, re- 
sorted to extraordinary measures. 

Benjamin Franklin, who affiliated with no church, 
yet was the friend and adviser of all, was consulted. 
Two young men who had in vain applied to Canter- 
bury went to Paris to have a talk with Dr. Franklin, 
and his advice was delightfully characteristic. Let 
the Episcopalian clergy in America either become 
Presbyterians, he suggested, or else elect a bishop 
for themselves. This matter-of-fact, shrewd counsel 



i8 



Nation Builders 



was, to an English churchman's views, as heretical 
as it was revolutionary. It met no favor from the 
clergy of the established English church, and it hor- 
rified even so ardent a reformer as Charles Wesley. 
There were, however, certain men, inspired with a 
desire to proclaim salvation, who heard the advice 
of America's foremost philosopher with deep satis- 
faction. That advice coincided in spirit with the 
counsel given by John Wesley to his American fol- 
lowers. It is probable that Franklin was not the 
first to conceive the idea of separation from the 
English church, but there can be little doubt that his 
words had weight even with those who deplored 
what they were accustomed to call his rationalism. 

Whatever the relative influence of several coun- 
selors, the influence of events was pressing in one 
direction — toward the separation of the American 
followers of Wesley from the parent church, to 
which he still claimed allegiance. 

There seems to have been a strong and persistent 
inclination among the young men who were gather- 
ing around Francis Asbury to organize an inde- 
pendent body, but not until Wesley's views upon the 
subject had been received did Asbury feel satisfied 
to advance. When first appealed to, Wesley had 
advised patience, and the veneration of his American 
co-religionists for his almost apostolic personality 
kept their impatience in check, and they wisely 



Introductory 



19 



waited for an initiative that bore the weight of his 
authority. 

As elsewhere noted, Mr. Wesley's final attitude 
toward the organization of a separate church in 
America showed how far he had drifted, and how 
insensibly, from the method and government of the 
Episcopal Church, His ordination of Dr. Coke to 
a superintendency that was in all but name a bish- 
opric was accompanied by an avowal of his implicit 
belief in his ow r n providential calling to perform that 
act, which might justly at that time have been 
regarded as a usurpation of episcopal authority. 
When Francis Asbury was designated by Wesley 
as Coke's coadjutor the new superintendent was 
greatly impressed by "the wisdom, consideration, 
love, meekness, and authority" of his associate. 

A "Conference" — the word was not as familiar 
then as it has since become — w T as called at Balti- 
more, when sixty out of the eighty-one American 
ministers of Wesley's following met, either on 
Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, in 1784, and there 
established the form of worship and of church gov- 
ernment to which, in the main, their successors have 
adhered for a century. Then a unanimous vote de- 
cided the independence of the American church, to 
which the name Methodist Episcopal was officially 
and formally given. 

Asbury was ordained, first, deacon; then, elder; 



20 



Nation Builders 



and finally— the appointment by Wesley having 
been popularly sustained — was invested by the lay- 
ing on of hands with the authority of a bishop, 
though at first the title "superintendent" was used 
instead of the older Episcopal name. Before long the 
word "bishop" was substituted for "superintendent/' 
at first in popular usage and afterward in the printed 
Minutes and Discipline of the society. So in a few 
years Wesleyism had already outrun Wesley, and 
the great initiative was solemnly assumed by the 
fathers of American Methodism. The government 
of the new body consisted of superintendents (or 
bishops), elders, and deacons. Of the elders there 
were two classes : first, the presiding elders ; and, sec- 
ond, the traveling elders, who were also empowered 
to "administer the ordinances and perform the office 
of marrying," and who were elected by the Annual 
Conference and ordained by bishops and elders by a 
laying on of hands. A bishop, having been elected 
by the General Conference, must be ordained by the 
imposition of hands by three bishops, or one bishop 
and two elders. 

The great, vital feature of the new church was 
its itinerant system. There had been itinerants be- 
fore in the world's history, and missionaries of 
nearly every creed, and their labors and devotion 
have been the subject of an almost endless succes- 
sion of books, while admiration for their inestima- 



Introductory 



21 



ble courage has swayed the hearts of all Christen- 
dom; but never before did a church destined to 
become great and powerful in the family of Christ 
establish as its main working force a body of men 
devoted to a perpetual pilgrimage, yet held strictly 
to the rules and discipline of ecclesiastical govern- 
ment. 

This was the strangest anomaly of the times. 
The man who shook his bishop's hand after Con- 
ference and turned his horse's head toward the 
forest, with no property except the animal he be- 
strode, the homespun clothes upon his back, and the 
Bible in his pocket, with no protection from the dan- 
gers of the wilderness save in the outreaching arm 
of an ever-present Providence, with no constraint 
upon his movements save that imposed by his own 
conscience, was held to a strict accountability 
through all his trackless circuit, and at stated inter- 
vals returned to render a report to the body — the 
very democratic and elective body — of which he was 
a member. Never in the world have the principles 
and methods of democracy been more triumphantly 
illustrated than by the Methodist circuit riders, who, 
having aided to elect an ecclesiastical superior, fol- 
lowed his commands with the obedience of soldiers, 
even to death. 

The first Methodist Conference held in America 
was in Philadelphia, on July 14, 1773, in Saint 



22 



Nation Builders 



George's (Episcopal) Church. The Episcopal 
churches and clergymen in America seem to have 
been at first hospitable to the new body. It should 
never be forgotten that Methodism was at the outset 
distinctly a reformation within the church. It was 
not an effort to found a new church, though circum- 
stances led to that end. 

The ten members of the Methodist connection 
who were present at the Philadelphia Conference 
were Thomas Rankin, Richard Boardman, Joseph 
Pilmoor, Francis Asbury, Richard Wright, George 
Shadford, Thomas Webb, John King, Abraham 
Whitworth, and Joseph Yearbry. The membership 
then reported was 1,160. By 1775 the membership 
had grown to 3,148. In 1777 the roll of members 
showed 6,968 and 38 itinerants. In 1783, shortly 
after the close of the war for independence, Francis 
Asbury wrote: "We have about 14,000 members,. 
80 traveling preachers, and between 30 and 40 cir- 
cuits. . . . The gospel has taken a universal spread." 

Even in colonial days New York city was a 
refuge for all the creeds of Christendom and for 
some with which Christendom had no dealings 
whatever. It was from an early date a very cos- 
mopolis of sects, vying with Rhode Island in this 
particular, for it is said that it harbored no less 
than a dozen societies or congregations at a time 
when the neighboring colonies drew strait lines, and 



Introductory 



23 



some even advocated the whipping post and the 
fagot. By the middle of the eighteenth century 
two Protestant denominations had so far outgrown 
all others that they probably included more than 
half of the churchgoing population. The Dutch 
Reformed Church, by right of priority, might have 
claimed the honors due to an established form of 
worship; but the Episcopal service, being more 
familiar to the high officials from England, became 
a strong rival. About these twain gathered Pres- 
byterians, Roman Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, 
Quakers, and every familiar form of ecclesiastical 
dissent. 

Some immigrants, arriving in 1760, brought with 
them ' a revitalized conception of an old faith, to 
add to the already long list of creeds. They were 
but a handful, a poor company of unfortunate Ger- 
mans, originally from the Palatinate, but hailing 
last from Balligarame, in Ireland. They had been 
twice or thrice banished, but they had found in 
religion that vitality which the church of the Dutch 
first families in New York and the church of the 
British officers were in danger of forgetting save 
as a vague tradition. The Palatines brought to 
America the seed for a new planting. 

Their novel development of faith bore the im- 
press of John Wesley's character, and was after- 
ward for a while known by his name, though we 



24 



Nation Builders 



generally know it as Methodism. Its introduction 
into New York was so unostentatious that not a 
dozen people were aware of its arrival. The ser- 
mons that were preached from old conservative 
pulpits were wordy and doctrinal. Men and wom- 
en were to be saved or damned according to the 
logic of their creeds. Those who brought a fresh 
confidence in the vitality of faith came with a 
mission. 

For the first six years the Palatines were without 
church or chapel, content to live quietly, governed 
by conscience, avoiding wrangling, and cleaving to 
their ideals. Then one of them — a woman named 
Barbara Heck — remonstrated with her co-religion- 
ists about their inactivity. How long it was neces- 
sary to urge them we do not know, but it is a historic 
fact that in 1766 Philip Embury, who had been a 
local preacher in Ireland, opened his house for 
public worship, and there held the first service of 
the first Methodist church in America. The impor- 
tant landmark was situated on what is now Park 
Place, then called Barrack Street. It was some- 
what far uptown in that day, and we are told 
that the congregation that met there numbered six 
souls. 

A year passed, and the vitality which has so dis- 
tinguished this denomination began to evince itself. 
The congregation had grown— had outgrown its 



Introductory 



25 



contracted rooms on Barrack Street, and now wor- 
shiped in more commodious quarters. It hired the 
rigging loft at what is now 120 William Street. 
The entire denomination ought to own that spot and 
erect there a memorial worthy of it. The rigging 
loft stood for nearly a century after the Methodists 
began to meet there. The most notable figure in 
this early chapter of church history was Captain 
Thomas Webb, an officer in the British army, who 
preached in his scarlet regimentals. Tradition tells 
us that he was large and imposing in figure and that 
he was blind in one eye. He was said to be an 
eloquent exhorter, and did much to draw people 
to the new religious society. 

A year more, and the rigging loft was abandoned 
for a church — an actual church, built on a lot on 
John Street. The lot cost about fifteen hundred 
dollars, which was raised by subscription, the mili- 
tant preacher heading the list with thirty pounds. 
It is both interesting and instructive to read the list 
of the friends that the new movement had won in 
two years' time. The English clergymen gave "ac- 
cording to their means. " Oliver de Lancey put 
down £6 ios., and James Jarvis gave in all three 
times as much ; while William Lupton equaled Cap- 
tain Webb's munificent gift. The names of the Liv- 
ingstons, Rhinelanders, Goelet, Walton, Rutgers, 
Desbrosses, Van Wyck, Duane, De Peyster, and 



26 



Nation Builders 



twenty others that are part of the city's foun- 
dation walls are to be found on that subscription 
list 

The new church was dedicated in 1768. It was 
a little back from the thoroughfare, probably with 
a grassy yard in front, and it was flanked by the 
preacher's house, or parsonage. This first John 
Street Methodist Church was a stone structure, sixty 
by forty-two feet, with galleries that were reached 
by ladders. It was called the Wesleyan Chapel, and 
it is interesting to know that this was the first use 
of the name. There were no other rooms than the 
main auditorium, where the worshipers were divided 
according to sex. There was no sumptuous ease and 
no discrimination made for churchgoers of quality. 
The seats, or benches, had neither cushions nor 
backs. Mr. Embury was the regular minister until 
1770, and it is a tradition that he assisted to build 
the church and made its uncomfortable furniture, 
for he was a carpenter and worked at his trade for 
a livelihood. 

When the congregation had grown to a thou- 
sand people, which it did in about four years from 
the start, Mr. Robert Williams, who had from 
W esley a commission to preach, took the pastorate. 
The following extract from the minute book of the 
church, showing the disbursements on Mr. Wil- 
liams's account, has been published : 



Introductory 27 

1769 

Sept. 20. Mr. Jarvis for a hat for Mr. Williams £2 50 

Sept. 22. Book for Mr. Williams 9 

Oct. 9. Cloak for Mr. Robert Williams 3 06 

1770 

July 26. Paid Mr. Maloney for shaving preachers. . . 2 56 
Nov. 22. Paid Mr. Boardman for one quarter's 

clothing 7 10 o 

1771 

May 16. Castor oil for Mr. Pilmoor o 30 

1772 



July 16. Cleaning the dwelling-house and house- 
keeping, washing for the preacher, etc.. 5 38 

The Mr. Boardman, who is mentioned as having 
received a quarter's clothing—whatever that may 
mean— and Mr. Pilmoor, were two missionaries 
that John W esley sent out at the same time that he 
gave Mr. Williams his warrant to preach. In fact, 
Williams was to report to the two missionaries and 
work under their direction, but he arrived in New 
York before them, with the result that he was set- 
tled in the new church for a while. Mr. Pilmoor 
afterward became a clergyman of the Church of 
England. Mr. Boardman returned to England be- 
fore the War of the Revolution, and died there in 
1782. The missionaries who succeeded these two 
were the great Francis Asbury, the father of the 
Methodist Church in America, and Richard Wright, 
his associate. 

In 1773 Thomas Rankin became the pastor of 
the John Street Church, and then, at intervals of 



28 



Nation Builders 



one year, George Shadford, James Dempster, Daniel 
Ruff, and John Mann. The last-named came in 
troublous times (1778), and simply took up the 
work which others had somewhat hastily laid down. 
He was a "local preacher/' who was not to be 
scared away from his post by war's alarms till relief 
came. He preached with all the power that was in 
him, and resigned at length to Mr. Samuel Spraggs, 
who came from Philadelphia and stayed five years, 
being unable to get away or to procure anyone to 
take his place. 

In war time the Methodists, as a body, did not 
allow political differences to interfere with church 
worship any more than absolutely necessary. The 
Hessians shared the building, their chaplains offi- 
ciating on Sunday mornings and the regular con- 
gregation in the evenings. The fact that many of 
the ministers had left the city and churches were 
closed in consequence led to an increase rather than 
a falling off in the attendance at the Wesleyan 
Chapel. 

As there has never been a recorded instance of a 
Methodist meeting where a collection was not taken, 
it will surprise no one to know that the years of the 
British occupancy of New York, during the war for 
American independence, were not the least prosper- 
ous of all during the first quarter century of the 
church's history. 



CHAPTER II 
Along a Blazed Trail 

The course of the circuit rider was a blazed trail. 
He was a pioneer among the pioneers, swept onward 
by the impulse of advancing population, in the very 
forefront of the great race migration that finally 
peopled the West and that made the wilderness to 
blossom, if not with the rose, at least with the more 
prosaic fruits of industry and intelligence. 

The earliest chapters of Methodist history in Eng- 
land have been touched upon lightly in the intro- 
ductory pages of this book; not fully, because, 
though of themselves interesting, yet they form no 
direct part of our theme. The revival that com- 
menced within the cloistered walls of Oxford, which 
drew together the little band of devout youth that 
won the derisive name of the Pious Club, and which 
sent John Wesley and his devoted companions out 
to preach a revitalized religion in the cities and by- 
ways of England, may be referred to here only as 
the genesis of American Methodism. Our study is 
of the men who went into the wilderness to preach 
the gospel, of the tragedy, the pathos, the humor, 
and the heroism of their lives, but more particularly 
of the meaning and the result of their mission. 



3° 



Nation Builders 



It is necessary that we try to understand as fully 
as possible the religious condition of the United 
States when the government was in its infancy; 
that we examine as far as possible the character and 
causes of the great advance that filled the forests 
and the plains, that swept over the mountains and 
followed the course of the Cumberland and the 
Ohio ; and that we scrutinize the sources of the pop- 
ulation of the border states, which were the great 
field in which Bishop Asbury and his brave sub- 
ordinates sowed the seed for future harvests. 

At the founding of the republic there was for the 
first time in the history of the world a complete 
divorce between church and state. Before that time 
the secular arm had always been prompt to interfere 
with religious dogma and practice. The idea that 
any state could with safety permit the independence 
of the church within its domain, or that the church 
could stand secure without the support of the state, 
had never been generally considered as sane proposi- 
tions till advanced in America. The most dissolute 
monarchs that ever disgraced their crowns were, 
by virtue of their office, in positions of ecclesiastical 
authority, and even that aristocracy which is known 
to history as the Dutch republic clung to the 
universal theory of a dependent and subsidized 
church. 

It is worth remembering that the conception of 



Along a Blazed Trail 



3i 



a free church in a free state was not only part of 
the American idea, but that it was second to no 
feature of that national movement in its originality 
and importance. Advanced in early colonial days 
by Roger Williams, it was adopted by the men who 
signed the Declaration of Independence and is 
amply guaranteed by the Constitution of the United 
States. American church history, therefore, is the 
record of free and independent societies. In this 
respect it differs from any record of similar bodies 
in the Old World. 

The voluntary surrender of all rights of inter- 
ference by the government of the United States 
made the natural development of all religious sects 
possible. Over all the land men prayed or preached 
as they chose, without priority of rank claimed by 
one denomination above another. New England 
Congregationalists, Pennsylvania Presbyterians and 
Quakers, New York Reformed Dutch, Maryland 
Catholics, Virginia Episcopalians, or Rhode Island 
Baptists — all expanded or contracted their spheres 
of ecclesiastical influence, made differences and set- 
tled them— or left them unsettled — established mis- 
sions, conferences, publication offices, seminaries, 
and boards without hindrance or assistance from 
the government. 

In such a rivalry there could be but one result: 
the more virile and competent churches forged to the 



32 



Nation Builders 



front, and each society found the field best fitted to 
its enterprise. 

In the North and East the Presbyterian and Con- 
gregational Churches were strong and sound. The 
first named had also a staunch following in the more 
southern of the seaboard states, particularly among 
the Scotch-Irish inhabitants. The Baptists, except 
in Rhode Island, had not reached the importance 
they afterward attained. The Episcopal Church, 
especially in Virginia, had been during colonial days 
ministered to by men whose notoriously lax lives 
were a reproach to their generation. At the sound 
of the Lexington fray these fox-hunting, dram- 
drinking parsons fled to England. 

During the same period the more austere and 
intellectual New England divine was hammering out 
and attenuating his nugget of truth into long-spun 
wires of theological webs. The water of life seemed 
often in danger of being absorbed and dissipated 
in the dry sands of polemical controversy. 

In all the land there had been an awakening to 
evangelical light when Whitefield made his memor- 
able tour of the colonies ; all sects had felt the influ- 
ence of his preaching, but the vigor of that inspira- 
tion was greatly diminished before the outbreak of 
the Revolution, and in the troubled years that fol- 
lowed that outbreak religion languished in America. 

With the rehabilitation of business and social life, 



Along a Blazed Trail 33 



the readjustment of old conditions, and the adoption 
of new ones under the new government, the oppor- 
tunity for the development of a religious body that 
could adapt its methods to the exigencies of rapidly 
expanding national life was phenomenally great. 
The Methodist Church enjoyed the great advantage 
of being, like the nation, in its formative stage. In 
common with other societies, it was relieved from sec- 
ular control and could pursue its destiny unchecked. 
There was no preempted territory for it to claim 
as its right, but it proved the potentiality of the 
grain of mustard seed. Its opportunity, unlike that 
of the older and more definitely organized bodies, 
was obviously in newly settled regions, where its 
Presbyterian, Congregational, or Dutch Reformed 
neighbors had not the advantage of a century of 
occupation. 

The preachers of the new method were obliged 
to contend with tremendous difficulties, arising from 
the unsettled condition of the border states when 
their greatest work was accomplished. These diffi- 
culties were of two sorts, the first grouping all of 
the material obstacles and physical perils presented 
by an almost uninhabited wilderness, and the second 
combining the several impediments to progress that 
were inseparable from communities scattered loosely 
over a wide territory and living without common 
interests or aims. 



34 



Nation Builders 



The first experimental confederation of states 
lately emerged from the condition of colonial de- 
pendence did not embrace a homogeneous popula- 
tion. Except in a few seaboard cities, as we shall 
have occasion to show, little groups of settlers or 
scattered individuals upon the frontiers lived isolated 
lives. The one common bond of sympathy and 
union had been the war, and after the w r ar there was 
a tendency toward segregation, especially in farm 
and frontier life. Even the large cities of the sea- 
board were but imperfectly informed about each 
other. New York and Boston were connected by 
a precarious stage service, and a journey from 
Providence to Baltimore was almost what a jour- 
ney from Chicago to Manila would be at the present 
day. As a startling illustration of the tardiness with 
which news was conveyed, we may be reminded 
that George Washington, having closed his eyes 
upon life at Mount Vernon, was buried before Con- 
gress, then sitting at Philadelphia, was informed of 
his death. Ordinary news did not travel, even 
slowly. It was too discouraged to move, and stayed 
at home. 

By reviewing such facts as these we receive a just 
impression of the conditions which the older gen- 
eration of the Methodist ministers had to face. We 
know that there are explosive substances whose 
energy is expended along the line of greatest re- 



Along a Blazed Trail 



35 



sistance — so Methodism exerted itself with the 
greatest vigor where the obstacles were greatest. 
It displayed an apostolic prescience in discovering 
in the barred way the way of opportunity. 

The Methodist preachers, though not always men 
of education, were, in the broadest and truest sense, 
picked men. They went into their field with strong 
convictions, an overmastering sense of responsibility, 
the courage of soldiers, and the spirit of martyrs. 
No man of weak will or faltering resolution could 
have taken up the life of danger and self-sacrifice 
demanded of every candidate for this work, and no 
man who had not a fair physical constitution could 
possibly have persevered in it. The whole moving 
frontier of our country, that rolled westward year 
after year like a resistless tide, covered the graves 
of hundreds of Methodist itinerants who died hero- 
ically at their posts. 

A single circuit in the old days might embrace 
several hundred miles of unbroken wilderness, 
where the ring of the pioneer's ax had only begun 
to be heard at remote distances; where the most 
familiar sounds were the cry of the panther and the 
yell of the equally savage Indian. If the settler, in 
partial touch, perhaps, with two or three others of 
his adventurous kind, provided with firearms and 
protected by the log walls of his shanty or by a 
palisade of logs, was in constant danger from wild 



36 



Nation Builders 



beasts and marauding savages, what must be thought 
of the courage and fortitude of the preachers who 
multiplied tenfold those common dangers by expos- 
ing themselves unsheltered, unaccompanied, and 
unarmed in every lonely valley and desolate moun- 
tain, in the vicinity of camps of hostile red men, 
by fever-haunted swamps, and in the path of the 
tempest ? W e read in every story of that heroic day 
the almost uninterrupted chronicle of pillage, tor- 
ture, and massacre, but we have no record of any 
Methodist preacher who ever flinched or turned aside 
from his circuit for fear of Creek or Cherokee. 

Men in all lands read with a thrill of romance 
the sagas of old heroes, the knightly tales of an out- 
worn chivalry, the adventurous and gilded brigand- 
age of Sir Launcelots and Sir Bediveres and Sir 
Gawains, who went a-questing in that very misty 
period that is known as "once upon a time"; but 
a nobler chivalry, a more exalted bravery, was ex- 
hibited almost within our own time by the humble 
and often forgotten saddlebag men of Methodism. 

It is not a forced comparison that places the itin- 
erant preacher on a par with the knight who prances 
through the pages of Mallory's Arthurian fables. 
No Galahad ever sought the Holy Grail with purer 
purpose than did the Axleys and Burkes, the Big- 
clows and Akens, in Virginia, Kentucky, and Ten- 
nessee, in New York, Ohio, and Indiana. What 



Along a Blazed Trail 37 



are apocryphal dragons and "orgulous' ' beasts, 
strangely misplaced Hons, or even knights and 
vague enchantments, compared with forest fires, 
congestive fevers, perils of flood and tornado, pierc- 
ing cold, hungry wild beasts, and almost ubiquitous 
savages of the American forests? The giants and 
ogres of fable were invented by men who did not 
know the Snake and the Blackfeet, the Pawnee and 
the Sioux. You may search all the pages of ro- 
mance and recall all that has ever been written in 
celebration of heroism and yet find nothing to excel 
the manliness of the men who stood again and again 
before Asbury, at the close of a Conference, and 
waited, with the cheerfulness and fortitude of good 
soldiers, for orders. If any man had an uncommonly 
good record, was distinguished by health of body, 
vigor of mind, or peculiar beauty of character — if he 
was one to whom the heart of the great leader went 
out with tenderness— that was the man who was apt 
to find himself assigned to the hardest and most dan- 
gerous circuit. The post of danger was considered 
the post of honor, and the man who died at his 
station was as one who had been signally favored 
of God. 

The first associates of Bishop Asbury were 
Thomas Rankin, Richard Boardman, Joseph Pil- 
moor, Richard Wright, George Shadford, Thomas 
Webb, John King, Abraham Whitworth, and Jo- 



38 



Nation Builders 



seph Yearbry. They were at first missionaries to 
the older cities and centers of population. Pil- 
moor, Shadford, Boardman, Webb, and others 
officiated at different times at the old John Street 
Church in New York, of which we have already 
written. 

As we have seen, it was not until the famous 
Christmas Conference in Baltimore, in 1784, that 
the Methodist Church was organized as a separate 
body. In the interval of a hundred and twenty 
years the few thousands of that early communion 
have increased to millions, the handful of preachers 
has become an army, and the weight of their influ- 
ence has been mighty in every important question 
which has come before the American people. If 
we would understand the springs of action that have 
swayed whole sections of country at particular 
crises in our national life, we must go back to the 
saddlebag men of Methodism. To the fact that 
they rooted out the thistle and planted the grape 
is due that other fact that in our day grapes and 
not thistles have been the main harvest. 

No better illustration can be given of the hard- 
ships that beset the itinerant preacher than may be 
found in the unadorned narrative of the venerable 
Elder Burke. Speaking of the circumstances at- 
tending a Conference at Mastersen's Station, in 
Kentucky, as early as 1793, he says : 



Along a Blazed Trail 39 



"Previous to the meeting of the Conference we 
raised a company of twelve persons to proceed to 
the seat of the Conference, for the purpose of guard- 
ing Bishop Asbury through the wilderness. We 
met a company at the Crab Orchard, the place we 
usually met, by advertisement circulated for the 
purpose of collecting a sufficient number for protec- 
tion against the Indians. 

"The company, when assembled, consisted of 
about sixty, all well armed. We organized that 
night, and I was appointed commander, In the 
morning, all things being in readiness for our de- 
parture, we proceeded through the wilderness. The 
day previous there had started a large company, 
and among the number were four preachers — two 
Baptists and two Dunkards. The company with 
whom they traveled treated them in such an tin- 
gentlemanly and unchristian manner during the first 
day and night that in the morning of the second 
day they all four started in advance, and had not 
proceeded more than one mile before they were sur- 
prised by a party of Indians, and all four killed and 
scalped, and their horses and all that they had taken 
off by the Indians. We camped the first night not 
far from Big Laurel River, and the next morning 
passed the spot where the dead bodies of the 
preachers were thrown into a sink hole, and cov- 
ered in part with some logs, and the wild beasts 



4Q 



Nation Builders 



had torn and mangled them in a most shocking 
manner. 

"That day we crossed the Cumberland River, and 
passed up the narrows to Turkey Creek, and camped 
on the bank. I had not slept on any of the two 
preceding nights, and that night I intended to take 
a good sleep. Accordingly, after placing out the 
sentinels and securing my horse, I spread my saddle 
blankets and, with saddle and saddlebags for my 
pillow, laid me down close to my horse, and was, 
in a few minutes, fast asleep. It was not an hour 
before the company were alarmed. Some said they 
heard Indians ; others affirmed that they heard them 
cutting cane for their horses and heard their dogs 
barking at their camp up the creek ; and before they 
awakened me the greater part of the company were 
on their horses and had left the sentinels at their 
posts. Such was the panic that I immediately har- 
nessed up my horse and mounted, and had the 
guards brought in. The night was very dark, and 
we had to cross the creek immediately. The bank 
-was- A^ry^steep, and we had to cross in Indian file; 
and before all had passed the bank became very 
slippery, and the horses would get nearly to the top 
and slide back into the creek again. I was in front, 
and the word passed along the line, 'Halt in front/ 
At length all got safely over, and proceeded about 
four miles, to Cannon Creek. The night being very 



Along a Blazed Trail 



4i 



dark, and finding great difficulty in keeping the 
path, I ordered a halt, and directed every man to 
turn out to the left and dismount and hold his horse 
by the bridle. They accordingly did so, and I threw 
the reins of my bridle over my arm and laid down 
at the root of a beech tree and was soon asleep. 
I had previously given orders that we should form 
one hour before daybreak and be on the road, in 
order to elude the Indians, should they be in pursuit 
of us. . . . We crossed the Cumberland Mountains 
early in the morning, and that night arrived at 
Bean's Station, near the Holstein River, where we 
were met by the intelligence that Bishop Asbury, in 
consequence of ill health, could not attend the Con- 
ference in Kentucky." 

On the return journey the caravan was increased 
to about one hundred and twenty by the accession 
of a large number of immigrants and their pack 
horses. The guard which had come through to 
escort the bishop, it was agreed, should bring up the 
rear of the procession. When they arrived at the 
Cumberland River they found that stream very 
much swollen, and upon the opposite bank were a 
number of hostile Indians. The preacher-captain 
called for volunteers to ford the river with him, and 
managed to get eleven companions, who crossed, the 
savages retiring before them. The whole party then 
passed the river in safety, and, after a number of 



42 



Nation Builders 



alarms and narrow escapes, reached the Crab Or- 
chard In safety, their numbers augmented by several 
Methodist preachers who, at the imminent risk of 
their lives, were working their way through the 
wilds to the Conference. 

At that Conference Mr. Burke received his ap- 
pointment to the Hinckton Circuit, Kentucky. For 
the sake of a clearer understanding of the labors of 
a man of his class, let us see how far the circuit 
extended. Its northern and eastern boundaries con- 
sisted of the then frontier settlements— the circuit 
itself lying beyond the frontier. On the south ran 
the Kentucky River, and westward was the great 
Lexington Circuit. It was called a "three weeks' 
circuit/' that meaning that a vigorous traveler could 
go the rounds of its scattered clearings in that length 
of time, and it included the three counties of Clarke, 
Boone, and Montgomery. During the "summer of 
Wayne's campaign" (against the Indians) "great 
numbers were out in the service," and Burke was 
transferred to the Salt River Circuit. That was a 
four weeks' circuit, between four and five hundred 
miles around, and included Washington, Nelson, 
Jefferson, Shelby, and Greene Counties. 

Think carefully of all that the distance and the 
time involved in covering such a circuit implied. 
Once in four weeks every settler in four counties 
was visited by the same earnest preacher, who 



Along a Blazed Trail 



43 



brought, besides his heavenly message, all of the 
news of the widely scattered members of his parish, 
and made the lonely individuals of his flock inter- 
ested participants in the lives of some hundreds of 
other people. What the preacher on the Salt River 
Circuit or the Hinckton Circuit was doing every 
other itinerant in the Methodist connection was do- 
ing in his appointed field. Throughout the whole 
borderland this agency, and this agency alone, was 
laboring not only for the spread of the gospel, but 
for the creation and the conservation of unity — 
unity in thought, in spirit, in interest. 

Once in four weeks, twelve times in the year, the 
itinerant on Salt River made his round, an expected 
and welcome guest at many a cabin, the friend and 
counselor of men and women, the instructor of the 
children. He learned to know the woods and the 
watercourses, the signs of fair weather or foul, the 
cry of beast and the note of bird, to avoid danger, 
to endure hardship, to escape death by the exercise 
of woodcraft. He learned to travel alone in a re- 
gion beset often by warring Indians and yet keep 
his scalp, which was a remarkable feat in those days. 

After two years spent amid the fatigue and perils 
of this Indian-infested, wild-beast-haunted circuit 
the staunch old warrior could remember only one 
remarkable hardship. He says : "Nothing worthy of 
record — except hard times. I was reduced to the 



44 



Nation Builders 



last pinch. My clothes were nearly all gone ; I had 
patch upon patch and patch by patch, and I received 
only money sufficient to buy a waistcoat, and not 
enough for the making, during the two quarters I 
remained on the circuit." 

During the long struggle of the colonies for in- 
dependence religion withdrew unto the closet. If 
it did not languish in the hearts of men it certainly 
did not declare itself in their stupendous tasks. But 
when the strife was over, and the young nation 
found itself face to face with measureless respon- 
sibilities and untried duties, a new sense of thank- 
fulness and a new ardor of patriotism began to 
make themselves known, and gave an exaltant lift 
to the ambitions for which freedom had opened 
the way. 

Then it was that religion took up her burden 
again, with unshackled arms and a lighter heart. 
The war had left its inevitable heritage of poverty 
and exhaustion. The nation was poor, and the ex- 
tinction of martial excitement was followed by the 
usual reaction, in which carelessness and idleness 
were distressing elements. But over all was the ex- 
hilaration of a great work accomplished and the 
promise of a great future assured. 

All at once measureless opportunities were open- 
ing to a hardy race that had won its right to govern 
itself, and a new, clean continental vista unfolded 



Along a Blazed Trail 45 



to the energies and the ambition of peace. Vast as 
the new field was, lying in the unexplored shadows 
of the wilderness, where lurked the fiercest of human 
enemies and the most formidable of natural foes, 
it was nevertheless unstained by any of the iniqui- 
ties that man had instituted in the train of the Prince 
of Peace. 

Grim as the vista may have looked to the timid 
eye, there were no memorials of Christian hatred 
in it. No fagots had been lit in its primeval depths 
in the name of Christ, and no dungeons erected on 
its grassy plateaus for the cause of love. Beasts of 
prey and red-handed savages might dispute every 
foot of the advance, but there were no chartered 
regents of the Most High to burn and mangle for 
the Saviour's cause. The echoing spaces were desti- 
tute of all the comforts and refinements which rob 
life of its hardships and death of many of its terrors, 
but they were also free from the traditions of a 
Henry VIII, a Borgia, or a Torquemada, to which 
unwilling obeisance must be made. The most nox- 
ious everglades and the most inhospitable crags were 
alike ignorant of the precedents of Dort or the in- 
tolerance of Westminster, and gave little heed to the 
claims of Rome or the mistakes of Geneva. The 
sword had cut the continuity and the authority of 
religious strife, and, as events proved, the couriers 
of the faith. were to suffer less from cruel nature 



46 



Nation Builders 



than they had suffered from an overpious brother- 
hood of man. 

How well the founders of our commonwealth 
availed themselves of the priceless opportunity we 
now know, though we do not perhaps give that 
heed to it which it deserves. They determined not 
only to open a pathway through the wilderness to 
life and love, but to close the door to religious strife 
which lay behind them. They were not only to 
drive out the enemies of the present, but to put an 
everlasting curb on the enemies of the past. 

In the conventions which met in 1788 to ratify 
the Constitution we see the religious men all the 
ardent defenders of that clause which says that Con- 
gress shall make no law respecting the establishment 
of religion or prohibiting the free exercise of speech 
or of the press. In Massachusetts, where the oppo- 
sition to the abolishment of religious tests was the 
strongest, its ablest defenders were clergymen, and 
it was here that the Rev. Mr. Payson declared that 
human tribunals for the consciences of men were 
an impious encroachment on the prerogatives of 
God. 

The Constitution was adopted by seven states be- 
fore the close of the year 1788, and went into opera- 
tion in 1789. It was thus that the nineteenth cen- 
tury was greeted with a new guarantee, and reli- 
gious freedom, like a fresh beacon, shed its invita- 



Along a Blazed Trail 



47 



tion over the peaks of the Alleghanies as if a new 
sunrise were lightening in the west. 

The states which under a loose and imperfect 
confederation had succeeded in defeating Great 
Britain seemed in that struggle to have exhausted 
their common stock of vitality, and were like a sick 
man after a wearing fever has left him. The alli- 
ance, for it was hardly more than that, which had 
brought the thirteen colonies together in a common 
cause against the crown, was utterly ineffectual to 
build a political structure which should command 
reverence at home or respect abroad. The states 
pulled in various directions, each one for itself, each 
apparently trying to outvie the other in preposterous 
legislation to remedy local embarrassments. 

If there was little travel, there was less trade be- 
tween the principal markets of the land. Never was 
a population of equal size and intelligence poorer. 
The scarcity of money was so great that the expedi- 
ent of barter in trade was commonly resorted to; 
the condition of the little coin in circulation so bad 
that every merchant kept his coin scales upon the 
counter. The public treasury was as impoverished 
as the private purse. At one time the national treas- 
ury was absolutely without a dollar. Abroad, it 
was impossible to raise loans, except from the Jews 
at exorbitant rates of interest, Robert Morris, who 
had spent his large private fortune for his country's 



4 8 



Nation Builders 



aid, actually drew upon the American ambassadors 
abroad for money, sold the drafts for cash with 
which to run the machinery of the government, and 
left the luckless ministers in France or Holland to 
scrape together by hook or crook the loans which 
would keep them from being dishonored. American 
credit was the laughingstock of the world. Protec- 
tion for American citizens abroad was absolutely 
unknown. 

Under such conditions it is not hard to understand 
that there was little or no union sentiment among 
the people. A man rarely went outside his own 
state; knew nothing about the man across the bor- 
der, except to distrust him. The Union as we know 
it was not born yet. The war which was ended 
was a war for liberty, but it was for the liberty of 
each separate colony, banded together only because 
not one could have made any effectual struggle alone. 
The war for the preservation of the Union, in which 
a population was willing to lay down its life for a 
loyal idea, was the culminating act of a faith that 
had only begun to germinate three quarters of a 
century before. 

Among communities which did not travel the 
Methodist itinerants came and went. To people 
isolated through vast agricultural regions and scat- 
tered in frontier settlements they formed almost the 
sole cementing bond. To the men who could not 



Along a Blazed Trail 



49 



see across their hill ranges and over their forests 
they taught the tenets of a universal brotherhood. 
They gathered the population of a country in camp 
meetings and collected a congress of representatives 
from remote states in Conferences. More than any 
other agency, more than the political candidate, the 
officer of the government, or the occasional school- 
master, the Methodist preachers leavened the lump 
with democracy. They alone went everywhere, 
penetrated to every remotest hamlet, every ultimate 
cabin in the mountains, and, like the wandering pil- 
grims of mediaeval times, were the news carriers, the 
idea mongers of their day. More than any other class 
of men in the New World the itinerant preachers 
of Methodism were propagandists of the democratic 
idea. The very form of religion which they pro- 
fessed was democratic in its origin and tendency, 
if not in its form of government. The importance 
of the individual and the claim of the community 
were everywhere insisted upon. In practical work- 
ing the religious government was from the class to 
the circuit and from the circuit to the Conference. 

From the Eastern centers of civilization and 
thought to the farthest confines of the then Western 
country, from Baltimore to Canada, from Philadel- 
phia to the extreme frontier hamlets of Ohio and 
Indiana, it was the tireless Methodist preacher who 
carried with his message of gospel freedom the lat- 



50 



Nation Builders 



est proclamation of civil liberty. Over many hun- 
dreds of miles of the new country he alone kept the 
men of the Kentucky clearings and the Tennessee 
mountains, of farm and forest and valley, in touch 
with the cities of the seaboard. From his Confer- 
ences he not only took back to his field of labor the 
counsels and experiences of his co-religionists, but 
also the echoes of strenuous words and the acts of 
a struggling Congress. With the theology of Saint 
Paul and Saint John went hand in hand the political 
principles of Hamilton and Madison. The same 
men who carried the Bible into the wilderness car- 
ried the Federalist also. 

The only libraries for a large portion of the people 
of rural America were the books in the packs of the 
Methodist parsons. The only professors of political 
economy were the professors of the gospel of Jesus 
Christ. 

An old Methodist minister once preached a 
Thanksgiving sermon in which he said : "We back- 
woods people ought to thank God most heartily for 
two things, namely, the Indians and the Methodist 
preachers. For in the settlement of this great coun- 
try the Indians kept the white population from scat- 
tering into clans and taking possession of certain 
districts of country, claiming them and forming 
governments of their own— thus confining them to 
the government of the country. While the waves of 



Along a Blazed Trail 51 



population rolled out westward, the Indians rolled 
them back again and kept them together. Then the 
itinerant Methodist preachers, in the true spirit of 
their Master, followed up the emigrants from block- 
house to blockhouse and from cabin to cabin." 

This is possibly the only occasion on record when 
one who had been acquainted with the dangers of 
frontier life found reason to thank his Maker for 
the Indians, but the argument used is worth consid- 
eration. We may be sure that the divine destiny 
that shaped the ends of the republic bent all agencies 
to that result which we of to-day sum up in one 
phrase — the Union. 



CHAPTER III 



The Field 

The latter part of the eighteenth century saw 
the formation in America of numberless land com- 
panies, some of them organized with statesmanlike 
purpose to people new lands and increase the boun- 
daries of the new republic, others to further the 
financial fortunes of less patriotic speculators, but 
all tending toward the same general result— the peo- 
pling of the new lands that were then known as 
the West. 

It is hard to realize at this day the diversity of 
the conditions under which pioneer settlers pushed 
forward into the wild land beyond the inhabited 
borders of the thirteen original states. The first to 
advance — the skirmish line, as it were — consisted 
of lonely adventurers, generally single men, trap- 
pers and hunters, who fulfilled their mission, died, 
and were forgotten. They were the ephemera of 
population, leaves fluttering before the breeze, straws 
floating on the edge of the tide. They sometimes 
made discoveries and opened new paths. They not 
infrequently allied themselves with the savages and 
left a progeny of half-breed children. But they rarely 



The Field 



53 



became permanent factors in the problem of settle- 
ment. The second class, closely following these 
forerunners of population, were divided between 
those who may be called free agents, making choice 
of a home beyond the borders of civilization, 
partly no doubt through the influence of an indefi- 
nite popular fever for emigration, and those who 
were persuaded by land agents to a step of which 
they could not measure the magnitude. 

The scheme of Rufus Putnam and others threw 
many Revolutionary veterans into Ohio. Private 
land enterprises decreased the population of Vir- 
ginia and other states. Political sentiment and dis- 
content stripped North Carolina of her surplus pop- 
ulation. New York sent out hordes, so that an 
Albany correspondent to a New York paper at that 
time wrote of a constant stream of people, an end- 
less caravan, moving through that city westward. 
A census taker in Kentucky in 1790 showed a popu- 
lation of over seventy thousand, and numbered in 
the region between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, 
west of the Pennsylvania line, about four thousand 
souls. The next census, taken ten years later, gave 
forty-five thousand to Ohio alone, and above two 
hundred and twenty thousand to Kentucky. Be- 
tween 1790 and 1800 the contagious fever of emi- 
gration from the seaboard states became almost a 
delirium. Men disposed of whatever they owned 



54 



Nation Builders 



to raise the money necessary to move with their fam- 
ilies westward, into regions that were painted to 
the imagination with every alluring color, but which 
lost many supernal attractions upon a closer view. 
In a single decade, we are told by statisticians, the 
center of population in the United States moved 
westward forty-one miles. The majority of the ear- 
liest settlers in Tennessee came from North Carolina. 
There were a few straggling forerunners, whose 
status can hardly be accounted that of actual settlers, 
who drifted into the woods in advance of the tide of 
immigration that was soon to rise. 

The cabin that William Bean built upon the Wa- 
tauga in 1769, where a year later James Watson and 
others joined him, has been put down as the first 
bona fide settlement. Within the next year another 
company built a few huts near Rogersville, and 
about the same time the first store west of the Cum- 
berland Mountains was opened, on the Nollichucky, 
by Jacob Brown. Following these initial attempts 
at colonization a number of North Carolinians 
planted themselves upon what they at first supposed 
to be Virginia soil, but, finding that the territory 
belonged to North Carolina, they formed an alli- 
ance with the other settlements, under the name of 
the Watauga Association. It was a confederation 
for protective purposes, and survived several years. 

To Colonel Richard Henderson, who took up land 



The Field 



55 



between the Cumberland and Kentucky Rivers in 
1775, is due a larger plan of government than any 
contemplated by the Watauga Association. A num- 
ber of settlers, induced by Colonel Henderson's rep- 
resentations to follow him, built their cabins in that 
part of the country, and between them and the com- 
panies of James Robertson a compact of government 
was drawn up. It is needless to say that such a com- 
pact was of the crudest and loosest construction. 
If any measures facilitating the operation of courts 
of law were contemplated, or any means to secure 
the administration of justice, the provisions made 
for their operation generally proved inadequate, in 
the face of the conditions of backwoods life. In the 
towns there may have been some slight attempt to 
enforce them, but for years the very meaning of the 
terms "law" and "order" were forgotten by the men 
of the border. 

In spite of the dangers to which the frontiersmen 
were exposed the majority occupied lonely cabins 
in the woods, though through that section of coun- 
try which borders the Cumberland River the excess- 
ive and pertinacious hostility of the Creek Indians 
made settlement life much more common than upon 
some other parts of the frontier. Along the Cum- 
berland bluffs there was a series of small villages, 
with the cabins of isolated families scattered behind 
them through the border of the timber land. The 



56 



Nation Builders 



death rate from the knives and tomahawks of the 
savages was frightful. "No man dared to fell a 
tree, to plant an acre of corn, to pick a berry from 
a bush, to go to the nearest spring for water, or 
even to sit in the shade of his own cabin, but his 
gun and powderhorn were ready beside him. In 
1787 thirty-three men were killed by Indians within 
seven miles of Nashville." 

At the close of the eighteenth century Nashville 
was the largest and most important city in Tennes- 
see, though its claims to rank as a metropolis rested 
upon a couple of hundred log cabins, many of them 
floorless, with unglazed windows and clapboarded 
roofs. Besides these dwellings there were a court 
house, a jail, and several public houses. Beyond 
Nashville there was nothing to the west, nothing 
northward short of the Kentucky border, nothing 
eastward except a little chain of equally crazy set- 
tlements on the Cumberland, or the hamlet of Knox- 
ville, distant about a hundred and fifty miles as 
the crow flies, but fifteen days away in time. 
To reach it from Nashville men usually traveled 
well armed and in bands large enough to make head 
against the hostile Indians with which the country 
swarmed. 

An advertisement in the North Carolina State 
Gazette announced in November, 1788, the comple- 
tion of a road cut through the forest from Camp- 



The Field 



57 



bell's Station to Nashville, and the attendance of 
a guard to escort those who wished to travel to 
the latter place. It was further announced that the 
guard would again be in attendance at the same place 
a year later. 

Under the leadership of such men as John Sevier, 
long known as Nollichucky Jack, the men of the 
Carolina outposts that subsequently contributed to 
form the state of Tennessee not only held their own 
against the Indians, but actually made headway at 
an astonishing rate. Before there was any estab- 
lished court in that territory, except in one or two 
of the principal settlements, there began to be dis- 
putes concerning property, and Nashville presented 
a field for lawyers before the mud was dry in the 
chinks of its log huts. One of the early lights of 
that frontier was the young Andrew Jackson, who 
took his first lessons in warcraft from the Indian 
fighters of the Cumberland. 

In 1 79 1 the crushing defeat of Saint Clair by the 
Indians under Joseph Brent spread terror through 
the whole Western country. In Ohio, Tennessee, 
Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and wherever in 
the wilds the foot of a white man had trod, there 
was panic at the dreadful tale of atrocities, that in 
some mysterious way was circulated even to the 
remotest fastnesses of the forest. 

To a preacher crossing the Cumberland range to 



58 



Nation Builders 



penetrate the promised land lying to the west of 
them there was always an immediate prospect of 
hardships and dangers, of some of which we are not 
ignorant, even at this distance of time. First of all, 
there was the ever-present peril from the Indians. 
It was an old saying that the Creeks were always 
upon the warpath, and, indeed, that statement hardly 
exceeded the truth. Through the forest to Knox- 
ville, and beyond that embryo city to the more dis- 
tant Cumberland lands, there was a well-marked 
trail, emphasized upon more than one occasion by 
the passage of troops sent to deal with the savages, 
and traveled almost constantly in the autumn by 
bands of immigrants. Yet in spite of the fact that 
the trail was a highway for the annual passage of 
hundreds of people, it was a lonely and dangerous 
path, beset by every peril to which travelers in an 
American wilderness could be subjected. It bor- 
dered, if, indeed, it did not trespass upon, the res- 
ervation which even at that early day our govern- 
ment guaranteed to the Indians. It led through low 
lands where there were no streams, and through 
forests where panthers and wolves abounded. The 
way was long and arduous, but it was also one of 
exceeding natural beauty, and even its very rugged- 
ness must have spoken to the awakened mind of 
a traveling preacher of the sublimity of the Creator's 
handiwork. 



The Field 



59 



In another chapter of this book reference is made 
to a rendezvous of preachers at the Crab Orchard, 
where they united to form an escort for Bishop 
Asbury, then expected to travel westward. That 
famous spot has been described in the journal of 
an English traveler of that day in the following 
words : 

"It is a fine, large plain, or natural meadow, con- 
taining many hundred acres, and covered through- 
out its whole extent with a tall, rich grass, sur- 
rounded on every side by the neighboring mountains, 
and watered with several fine springs, which flow 
from one end to the other. The scenery of the 
craggy mountains, covered with trees to their very 
top, contrasted with the smooth level of the plain, 
afforded us a view highly picturesque, novel, and 
enchanting, and one which we could not dwell on 
but with pleasure. Near one end of it and not far 
from the road is a very great natural curiosity. It 
is a subterraneous cavity in a rock under the moun- 
tains, down which you descend by some steps cut 
in the stone into a large, spacious room, through 
which runs a clear, limpid stream of water, which 
rises from the rock at one end and flows out at 
the other through a passage underground, and dis- 
gorges itself in the open air not far from the en- 
trance to the cave." 

The whole of the way was full of surprises, and to 



6o 



Nation Builders 



a poetic or imaginative traveler must have afforded 
no little satisfaction; but its distressing features 
would prevent a too great absorption in its beauties. 
Not only were the Indians dangerous, but the newly 
established white inhabitants, when they could be 
found, were generally inhospitable and poor. It 
was no uncommon experience for a preacher to ar- 
rive at a cabin tired and hungry, after twenty or 
thirty miles of travel, or perhaps a night spent with- 
out shelter in the woods, and be told that the family 
had not enough for themselves and could not give 
to strangers. If hospitality was ever shown it was 
to a neighbor, whose good will might be worth hav- 
ing, but the wayfarer must not expect favors. Food 
was seldom given away until the preachers had 
gained something of a foothold in the country. 
When one had money or other equivalent to offer 
he might hope for pork and beans, hominy and 
bacon, or cornbread; beyond this the larder was 
usually empty save for what the forest provided. 
Many a preacher has recorded a repulse at this or 
that cabin in the wilderness, when he was obliged to 
lie down, hungry and thirsty, under a tree in the 
forest, and commit himself to the care of Him whose 
servant he was. 

A lodging in a Tennessee or Kentucky cabin, 
even when obtained, was not a thing to be coveted 
by fastidious people. A pile of husks without a bed- 



The Field 



6t 



stead, in a room occupied by half a dozen other 
people, on a floor of rough slabs so loosely placed 
that snakes not infrequently came up between and 
slept with the family, was all that a traveler usually 
dared to hope for. At the very rare houses of pub- 
lic entertainment that were by courtesy called inns 
it was customary to put a number of beds in one 
room, and if they were all full a newcomer might, 
according to a custom of the country, bunk with any 
one of the occupants he might choose, waiving the 
formality of an introduction. For such a lodging 
and a breakfast, such as a New England housekeeper 
would blush to offer to a tramp, a not unusual charge 
was a dollar. From such accounts as we have it 
would seem that the people of that region, though 
brave and persevering, were selfish and sordid, till 
awakened by a spiritual experience. 

The marvelous persistence of the Methodist 
preachers was exemplified in every clearing in the 
frontier woods, and the spiritual experience which 
alone could have worked a reformation in the 
habits of life and thought of the people and sub- 
ordinated their sordid anxiety to the splendid reality 
of a triumphant faith, was due to the ceaseless en- 
ergy, the tireless patience, with which the itinerants 
went, almost as mendicants, but full of beneficent 
purpose, from clearing to clearing, till the gospel 
was preached to every creature. 



62 



Nation Builders 



Along the Ohio River near the close of the eight- 
eenth century the settlements were as few as upon 
the Cumberland, and they were in as poor and as 
dangerous condition. Wheeling, with fifty log 
cabins, Marietta, with two hundred, and a few: 
smaller groups of humanity, were all that lay be- 
yond Pittsburg, from which point voyagers, well 
armed, trusted themselves with their families in 
clumsy boats to the current of the river, and pre- 
pared for a running fight with the fierce and crafty 
foes that at certain points along the shore were very 
sure to oppose their passage. There were several 
sorts of craft used by the Ohio River pioneers, the 
principal ones being flatboats, keel boats, and arks, 
the latter roofed in a fashion not unlike the popular 
conception of the ark in which the survivors of the 
Noachian deluge came safe to land. Such vessels, 
when laden with the women and children and the 
property and provisions of immigrants setting out 
for frontier homes, generally sailed in consort with 
others of their kind. Provided with strong slab 
bulwarks, they were practically floating forts, from 
which the long rifles of their defenders might be 
used with deadly effect. Their steering apparatus 
consisted of sweeps projecting astern, and suggest- 
ing the steering board of the ancient Norse galleys. 
These flotillas, long remembered upon the Ohio, 
were as distinctive as the wagon, called a prairie 



The Field 



63 



schooner, which came into use upon the plains of 
the farther West nearly a generation later. 

The woods and marshes that bordered the river 
abounded with game. The last of the buffalo were 
disappearing from that part of the country when 
the first rank of settlers came in. This fact should 
be noticed as evidence that in at least one instance 
the decline of the bison was not due to the wasteful 
energy of white hunters. Everywhere wild turkey, 
deer, elk, and bear were common, while the waters 
of the river teemed with palatable fish. 

Those voyages in company must have been won- 
derful, rememberable experiences. The life of 
almost complete idleness, enjoyed by men to whom 
tradition attributes wonderful qualities of courage 
and hardiness, to match their unrivaled stature and 
strength, but imputes also such vices as laziness and 
a love for strong drink, was varied by adventures 
which in another age and country would have been 
celebrated in heroic stanzas. The women, chatting 
together, or occupied with those domestic cares that 
were not to be intermitted even upon such a jour- 
ney, and the children, living in a real wonder-world 
of which they could not guess the extent or the 
value, were making the most of an experience that 
would probably never be repeated. 

Limestone, Columbia, and Newport were started 
—mere clusters of log huts. Cincinnati was a prom- 



64 



Nation Builders 



ise of something metropolitan, Louisville a place 
for carousals. There it happened that when Samuel 
S. Format! set up a store opposite the slab tavern, 
and greatly surprised his neighbors by shutting up 
shop on Sunday, some one expostulated with him, 
on the ground that Sunday had not come over the 
mountains. 

"O yes it has/' answered Forman, cheerfully, 
"I brought it." 

Near the mouth of the Scioto River the Indians 
had a cave where they made their rendezvous when 
preparing for an attack upon a party of immigrants, 
and the evil fame of this place spread throughout 
all the frontier. 

After the flatboats and arks had reached their 
„ several destinations and the voyagers parted to 
establish their separate homes, the memory of that 
brief social experience and the moving panorama 
of the country through which they had passed must 
have remained long with them, and even brightened 
by contrast the loneliness of their lives. Into a 
world to which ideas never came, where news sel- 
dom visited them, where the realities of life were 
nearly all hard, cruel, and exceedingly bitter, a world 
where terror and calamity were almost the only 
relief from an appalling monotony, the exiles of a 
century ago dropped and were lost to sight. 

Most of the pioneers came not from the centers 



The Field 



65 



of population, where alone at that day the facilities 
for education could be enjoyed. They had always 
lived near the border of the world. Finally they 
went over that border. They were not generally 
people who had within themselves those resources 
which might enable a family possessing them to 
endure a Selkirk existence without repining. They 
had what was perhaps a much better equipment for 
the work designed by Providence for them — that 
is, a store of superabundant physical vitality. Yet 
we cannot but believe that the lives of the pioneer 
women of America must have been purgatorial. 

The lawlessness of the Kentucky pioneer was so 
proverbial that the very term "Kentuck" was a syn- 
onym for all manner of deviltry. The Kentucky 
boatmen, we are told, were a class almost as greatly 
feared as the Indians. Their life was a savage alter- 
nation of displays of great physical strength and 
endurance and the most bestial debaucheries. Mod- 
ern parallels to their mode of life may be found in 
the Western mining camps of the forties or among 
the ranches of a latter day. In those days they were 
unmatched except by the teamsters of the Tennessee 
woods. It would be erroneous and wrong to picture 
the pioneer of that time as devoid of all Christian 
theory or practice, but it was at least like the leaven 
hidden in a measure of meal, and its working had 
not commenced. There were undoubtedly members 



66 



Nation Builders 



of different Christian denominations in Knoxville, 
Nashville, Cincinnati, and other prominent settle- 
ments at a very early day. These were mostly Pres- 
byterians, Baptists, and Methodists, their church 
affiliations depending largely upon the part of the 
East from which they had come out. These Chris- 
tian people sometimes formed small congregations 
and were ministered to by preachers who were ani- 
mated by a holy zeal. The Methodists alone formed 
circuits outside of the centers of population and 
visited for religious purposes with anything like 
regularity the outlying cabins and plantations that 
increased by the thousands every twelvemonth. 

Kentucky, which had gained the nickname of 
"Satan's Stronghold," became the object of especial 
solicitude to the preachers of Methodism. In Ken- 
tucky commenced the visible work of revival that 
soon was to assume a magnitude unparalleled in the 
history of modern religious movements, and unex- 
celled for force and potency even in the days when 
Peter the Hermit carried his enthusiasm like a fire- 
brand through the towns and hamlets of Europe, 
preaching a crusade for the recovery of the Holy 
City. Of the Red River revival John Bach Mc- 
Master makes this significant note : 

"Two young men began the great work in the 
summer of 1799. They were brothers, preachers, 
and on their way across the gine barrens to Ohio 2 



The Field 



6 7 



but turned aside to be present at a sacramental 
solemnity on Red River. The people were accus- 
tomed to gather at such times on a Friday, and by 
praying, singing, and hearing sermons prepare them- 
selves for the reception of the sacrament on Sun- 
day. At the Red River meeting the brothers were 
asked to preach, and one did so with astonishing 
fervor. As he spoke the people were deeply moved, 
tears ran streaming down their faces, and one, a 
woman, far in the rear of the house, broke through 
order and began to shout. For two hours after the 
regular preachers had gone the crowd lingered and 
were loath to depart. While they tarried one of the 
brothers was irresistibly impelled to speak. He 
rose and told them that he felt called to preach; 
that he could not be silent. The words which then 
fell from his lips roused the people before him to 
'a pungent sense of sin.' Again and again the 
woman shouted, and would not be silent. He started 
to go to her. The crowd begged him to turn back. 
Something within him urged him on, and he went 
through the house shouting and exhorting and prais- 
ing God. In a moment the floor, to use his own 
words, 'was covered with the slain/ Their cries for 
mercy were terrible to hear. Some found forgive- 
ness, but many went away 'spiritually wounded' 
and suffering unutterable agony of soul. Nothing 
could allay the excitement, Every settlement along 



68 



Nation Builders 



the Green River and the Cumberland was full of 
religious fervor. Men fitted their wagons with beds 
and provisions and traveled fifty miles to camp upon 
the ground and hear him preach. The idea was 
new. Hundreds adopted it, and camp meetings be- 
gan. There was now no longer any excuse to stay 
away from preaching. Neither distance nor lack of 
houses nor scarcity of food nor daily occupations 
prevailed." 

In a succeeding chapter we will dwell more par- 
ticularly upon the events here described. 

The settlement of Ohio and Indiana differed 
somewhat from that of the region we have been par- 
ticularly considering. 

During the entire period of national life in the 
United States few subjects that have claimed the 
attention of Congress have proved more provocative 
of discussion than the disposal of undefined, or ill 
defined, Western territory. From Virginia, that 
claimed vast tracts of land beyond the Ohio, to 
Maryland, stoutly refusing to join the first confed- 
eration of states till a settlement on that head had 
been reached, the representatives of the thirteen 
embryo states represented almost as many shades of 
political opinion. New York broke the deadlock 
which was the result of that discussion by a proposi- 
tion to cede the Western land claimed by her to the 
federal government, under certain restrictions and 



The Field 



6 9 



subject to certain conditions and reservations. 
Other states subsequently fell in line. In October, 
1780, Congress agreed to dispose of all lands so 
ceded for the common advantage. 

We may be permitted to go back to a still earlier 
period in order to understand the conditions pre- 
ceding and partly influencing the occupation of the 
Northwest by English-speaking immigrants. The 
first actual settlers of that part of the country that 
is now Indiana were Frenchmen, whose life was 
a free, irresponsible, reckless, half-savage existence. 
Their means of subsistence were such as satisfied 
their Indian neighbors. There was neither tillage 
nor manufacture. The few posts or settlements 
were mainly along the Wabash or its tributaries, at 
Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Ouitanon, and several other 
points. The business of the inhabitants being hunt- 
ing and kindred occupations, their trade staples were 
hides, pelts, tallow, and beeswax, in which commod- 
ities they, through their factors or agents, did quite 
a thriving business as early as 1735 or 1740. They 
lived contentedly under commandants, as their gov- 
ernors were called, and looked up to such exalted 
personages as 'Sieur cle Vincennes, or Jean Saint 
Ange de Belle Rive, as of quite another clay from 
common mortals. 

The first French comers laid claim to all the 
Mississippi valley and the broad belt of country 



70 



Nation Builders 



watered by its tributaries, and their explorers, as 
well as the more far-seeing of the French states- 
men of the day, dreamed of empire — a dream that 
might have been realized had the territory possessed 
a seacoast. The lives of the people were under the 
domination of courtiers and favorites, ambitious 
adventurers, and self-sacrificing priests of the Rom- 
ish Church. 

English dominion over the region referred to 
commenced with Wolfe's victory over Montcalm, 
a victory which the late Professor John Fiske char- 
acterizes as "the greatest turning point yet discov- 
erable in modern history." It was the decisive an- 
swer to the question whether French or English 
ideas and institutions should govern the destinies 
of the North American continent. When Saint 
Ange evacuated Vincennes he closed the chapter 
of French imperialism, picturesque indolence, and 
ignorance, and priestly domination. Admirable in 
their courage, devotion, and faith as the missionary 
priests were, it is doubtful if they would ever have 
stimulated their roving parishioners to clear think- 
ing or effective living. 

The English settlers who followed on the heels 
of the French were harder, coarser in the grain, 
more practical, less picturesque. The gayeties of 
the frontier villages gave place somewhat to bru- 
talities. The men who danced and sang, played the 



The Field 



7* 



fiddle, and appreciated the romantic and dramatic 
possibilities of the wonderland they inhabited gave 
place to a race that swung the ax and planted corn 
in the clearings, fought and hunted for recreation, 
were content to do without either politeness or reli- 
gion. Of course, the French settlers did not disap- 
pear when the English rule commenced, but they 
were no longer the dominant race, and new ideas 
ruled. The development of this frontier from the 
battle of the Heights of Abraham to the struggle 
for American independence was gradual and his- 
torically uneventful. 

The exploit of Colonel George Rogers Clark, who 
in February, 1779, captured Vincennes, was of tre- 
mendous importance to the future of the United 
States. In view of our great development it is safe 
to say that no more fruitful victory has ever been 
achieved within the borders of the United States. 
It was decisive in this important particular — that it 
enabled the young nation to maintain her claim to 
the territory that had once belonged to France, 
reaching to the line of the Spanish possessions, and, 
when the credit of the infant government was at its 
lowest ebb, to base loans upon these lands, then the 
only available collateral that the nation possessed. 
Mr. E. A. Bryan, writing for the Magazine of 
American History in 1889, has justly said: "All 
who have weighed the difficulties and dangers at- 



72 



Nation Builders 



tending the construction period following the Rev- 
olutionary War know that the basis of the marvelous 
success attending the financial management of the 
illustrious Hamilton lay in the millions of fertile 
acres which the genius and the sword of Clark had 
won." 

In the territory so acquired the sale of homestead 
land and the colonization of veteran soldiers was 
accomplished by the formation of the Ohio Com- 
pany, a plan first proposed by General Rufus Put- 
nam and put into effect as soon as titles could be 
obtained from the Indians and approximate surveys 
made. The company, in brief, was organized upon 
the proposal to take all the magnificent country 
north of the Ohio River and sell it in township lots 
to impoverished soldiers at a nominal price for each 
lot. To the individual settler his section was almost 
a free gift, so small was the price, but the aggregate 
provided a welcome and necessary addition to the 
depleted national treasury. A provision for terri- 
torial government was also made, and the develop- 
ment into states of the newly settled lands was a 
part of the far-reaching plan. The work of coloni- 
zation was done through the Ohio Joint Stock Com- 
pany, by whose agency lands were purchased and 
the details of the scheme worked out. 

These were the sources of population in Ohio and 
Indiana and all of the so-called Northwestern Ter- 



The Field 



73 



ritory. First the French coureurs des bois, in scat- 
tered trading posts; then the coarser but far more 
energetic English hunters and frontiersmen; and, 
last of all, a sudden influx of resolute New Eng- 
enders and Virginians, men who had proved their 
hardiness on the battlefields of the republic from 
Concord to Yorktown. Into this abounding wilder- 
ness thousands of the latter class went and were 
apparently swallowed up in the shadows of the 
universal woods. An army poured westward, seg- 
regated, and spread like the bursting of a rocket 
and became the isolated units who in time should 
form nuclei for villages and towns. 

It was upon such a field as this that the traveling 
preachers entered. In the northern region there 
was perhaps a greater basis of character, serious- 
ness of mind, and inherited tendency toward religion 
and morality to work upon than in the south. A 
large portion of the country w r as settled by dis- 
ciplined New Englanders. In the Cumberland and 
the Kentucky settlements the people seem to have 
been less self-controlled, more nervous, and more 
emotional, and perhaps these differences will account 
for the fact that the flame when once kindled in 
the south spread like a conflagration in the forest, 
leaping from hamlet to hamlet with the swiftness 
and something of the consuming power of flame, 
while northward the fire crept more slowly and 



74 



Nation Builders 



individuals were separately won. Both north and 
south the preachers had to contend with the same 
absence of the restraints of a well-organized gov- 
ernment or the controlling influences of civilized life. 



CHAPTER IV 
Some of the Sowers 

At the commencement of the nineteenth century 
Ohio, as we have seen, was the home of a scattered 
population of about forty-five thousand souls — that 
is to say, a handful when compared with the extent of 
the territory over which they were distributed. John 
Kobler, a Virginian by birth, is supposed to have 
been the very first preacher to proclaim the gospel 
message in that wild country. Sent out by Asbury, 
he pushed his way as far as the hardiest pioneer 
had penetrated, and spent eighteen years of his life 
in unremitting toil, in the face of incredible hard- 
ships, and then the overtaxed body gave out, and 
he was retired from the itinerant field, to be shortly 
afterward put upon the superannuated list. 

It will perhaps best serve the purpose of this work 
to give a part of John Kobler's experiences in his 
own words, as he wrote them in 1841 for the West- 
ern Historical Society: 

"In the year 1798 the writer of this article was 
sent by Bishop Asbury as a missionary to this region 
of country, then called the Northwest Territory, 
now Ohio State, to form a new circuit and to plant 
the first principles of the gospel. 



76 



Nation Builders 



"In passing through the country I found it almost 
in its native, rude, and uncultivated state. The in- 
habitants were settled in small neighborhoods, few 
and far between, and little or no improvement about 
them. No sound of the everlasting gospel had yet 
broken upon their ears. The site where Cincinnati 
now stands was nearly a dense and uncultivated 
forest. No improvement was to be seen but Fort 
Washington, which was built on the brow of the 
hill and extended down to the margin of the river ; 
around which was built a number of cabins, in which 
resided the settlers of the place. This fortress was 
then under the command of General Harrison, and 
was the great place of rendezvous for the federal 
troops which were sent by the government to 
guard the frontiers or to go forth to war with the 
Indians/' 

Kobler is described as a man of more than ordi- 
nary strength and endurance, with mental endow- 
ments above the average. He was the first of that 
devoted band of missionary preachers who stood at 
the threshold of new destinies, to guide the popula- 
tion of the Ohio frontier into the ways of order, law, 
and religion. What incalculable influence he and 
his colaborers wielded can only be guessed. The 
first communion table spread in Ohio by John 
Kobler drew together from all quarters between 
twenty-five and thirty communicants. Forty years 



Some of the Sowers 



77 



later the Methodist Church had enrolled there a hun- 
dred thousand members. 

Benjamin Lakin was another of the early preach- 
ers in Ohio. He followed Kobler closely, and was 
appointed to the Southern Miami District, as it was 
called; and, what makes his case somewhat unique 
for that place and time, he took his young wife with 
him. A personal account given by J. B. Finley of 
his first meeting with this courageous preacher re- 
fers to the year 1802 : "It was during this year we 
became acquainted with this pioneer. We met him 
as he was moving from Kentucky to the field of his 
labor. The point where we met him was on the 
eastern side of the Little Miami, the track of the 
railroad now (1855) occupying the spot. Then 
there was nothing which deserved the name of a 
road — a kind of a trace. We were surprised to see 
a man and a woman in a cart drawn by one horse ; 
surprised, because this was a superior way of trav- 
eling, not known to the settlers, who traveled and 
carried their movables on pack horses. As we came 
up we halted to look at his vehicle." 

There is something very naive and charming in 
the picture here suggested, the horseman looking 
with more admiration and curiosity on the luxury 
of a springless, rough, two-wheeled cart than we 
would bestow upon the latest triumph from the 
shops of fashionable manufacturers. 



78 



Nation Builders 



' As we stopped, he inquired how far it was to 
the next house. This we were unable to tell, for 
the road was uninhabited. We then had the curi- 
osity to ask him who he was, where he was going, 
and what was his business. He quickly replied: 
'My name is Lakin ; I am a Methodist preacher, and 
am going to preach the gospel to lost sinners in the 
Miami and Scioto country." 

Sixteen years Lakin stood it; then he went back 
and was put on the superannuated list. It was a 
hard life, that might superannuate a man of thirty- 
five or forty. How gloriously they spent them- 
selves, those great, brave fellows of a heroic time! 
They did not go blindfold, but with open eyes faced 
the conditions that meant a shortened life for most 
of them. Some of them got no pay, and none of 
them ever received much. They would not beg for 
themselves, being proud and self-reliant men, and 
they were often hungry and cold — a long proces- 
sion of them, four thousand ordained by Bishop 
Asbury alone; old young men, prematurely worn 
out, victims of fever, of starvation, of exhaustion; 
but no record has ever reached us of any complaint 
from a man of them, save this, that they could not 
spend their lives faster in their barter for souls. 

There have been other martyrs in the world's 
story, and will doubtless be many more as long as 
the path of duty starts away at right angles from 



SCME OF THE SOWERS 



79 



"the primrose path of dalliance/' The unique fea- 
ture in the martyrdom we have been contemplating 
was the fact that the martyrs of the frontier cir- 
cuits were not only cheerful but often jovial men. 
They delighted in innocent mirth, could tell a good 
story, and laugh at even their own mishaps. Theirs 
was courage of the highest order, that could make 
light of dangers and turn difficulties into a jest. 

There was at one time in the Northwest a sturdy 
preacher by the name of Jesse Walker, and his ex- 
ploits have become familiar traditions in the field 
where he labored. He went in his youth from 
North Carolina into Tennessee and Kentucky, and 
for ten years he ranged the forest and kept just 
ahead of the foremost of his brethren. It was said 
that he could not be tired out, but would travel 
without rest or food, with an almost superhuman 
patience and endurance. He had the woodsman's 
ability to locate the place he wanted to reach and 
travel to it in a straight line, as the bee or the 
pigeon does, without map or guide. He could not 
get lost either in the mountains or the canebrake, 
and he traveled with a delightful disregard of such 
small conveniences as roads or trails. 

Walker's ruling passion was to convert souls, and 
it was a matter of pride with him to be always first 
on the ground. In 1806 he was appointed to the 
Illinois Circuit, and set out in company with Mc- 



8o 



Nation Builders 



Kendree, who was presiding elder of the Cumber- 
land District, of which the Illinois Circuit was a 
part. They carried all their belongings in their 
saddlebags, and camped by the way, as the country 
over which they passed was entirely unsettled and 
unbroken. It must have been an exciting and pleas- 
urable journey to two such adventurous pilgrims, 
for they had rain, river floods, wild beasts, and other 
untoward things to combat. They swam the rivers 
and climbed the hills with the zest of boys out for 
a holiday. After forming a new circuit McKendree 
went toward Missouri, and Walker began to hunt 
out the scattered members of his appointed parish 
and see that not one was neglected. A man could 
not bury himself so deep in the wilderness that 
Walker did not find him and talk to him about his 
sins and the way of salvation. To those who did not 
want to hear him he must have seemed a perfect 
pest. It is told of him that once a new settler had 
just selected a site for his cabin and was looking 
for timber to build with when the preacher appeared, 
equipped with his Bible and full of zeal for the new- 
comer's spiritual welfare. He was greeted emphat- 
ically, if not cordially, by the latter, who explained, 
with considerable warmth, that he had moved from 
his last place to get rid of the Methodist preachers, 
who were worrying him to death. 

On another occasion a brother preacher made up 



Some of the Sowers 



81 



his mind that if it was possible he would steal a 
march on Walker, as he never visited a new family 
that he did not find the other had been ahead of him 
and had already preached to them. Hearing that a 
new family had located at Root River (Racine), 
he hurried to visit them. On his way he stopped 
at Fort Dearborn (now Chicago) and met Walker, 
who owned to being a little tired, as he had just 
come back from a call on that new family at Root 
River. Elder John Sinclair told the story, and 
added that after that experience he owned defeat 
and left the old pioneer to the unquestioned enjoy- 
ment of his laurels. 

Preeminent among American Methodists was 
Francis Asbury. Though an Englishman by birth, 
he had begun to be accustomed to the New World 
and its ways when at the Christmas Conference 
in 1784 he was chosen and consecrated a bishop, 
and he became the natural leader of the great move- 
ment that has influenced national life to an extent 
that few movements have equaled and few historians 
have recognized. 

It appears that Mr. Asbury refused the invest- 
ment upon authority delegated by Mr. Wesley till 
the choice had been confirmed and urged by the 
Conference, when he yielded to what must have 
seemed, even with such a backing, a very startling 
innovation. Never had a bishop been so democrat- 



82 



Nation Builders 



ically indorsed, and it may be said that no conse- 
cration of a similar character ever met with a 
greater outburst of disapproval from the Church of 
England. Charles Wesley was particularly vehement 
in his protest against a measure which he regarded 
not only as a dangerous but a wicked innovation. 

One of the first official acts of the new bishop was 
the signing of a memorial to Washington, setting 
forth the loyalty of the Methodist clergy to the 
infant government. The Methodists were the first 
to offer to Washington congratulations upon his 
election to the Presidency, and the Methodists were 
his firm and loyal supporters always. 

What might have been the history of Methodism, 
and how modified the history of the United States 
might have been, had it not been for the pronounced 
Americanism of Francis Asbury, of Staffordshire, 
it is impossible to say; but it is not too much to 
affirm that the influence he wielded has seldom been 
surpassed by that of any single man in America, 
and that its great weight was always in the balance 
with whatever measure conserved the union of the 
American states and the unity of the American 
people. 

The Englishmen sent as preachers to the Amer- 
ican colonies before the war by the Wesleyan Con- 
ference nearly all returned to the mother country 
when hostilities commenced. The two exceptions 



Some of the Sowers 



83 



to that exodus from the chosen field were said to 
be Shadford and Asbury. Bishop Simpson is au- 
thority for the statement that Asbury alone remained 
at his post. 

An early evidence of the new bishop's zeal was 
displayed in his effort to found a much needed col- 
lege in the neighborhood of Baltimore. This subject 
was broached during the first meeting between Dr. 
Coke and Mr. Asbury, and so energetically did they 
work that when the Conference met they had suc- 
ceeded in raising about a thousand pounds by 
subscription. 

Francis Asbury was forty-two years younger than 
Wesley, to whom alone he has been second in in- 
fluence in the society they served. The wisdom and 
humanity of the younger man, his high faith and 
noble courage, made him a fit leader of men, and 
his untiring zeal and industry enabled him to im- 
press upon his generation so deep a mark that there 
seems to be no immediate danger of its effacement. 
Asbury commenced his education at an English vil- 
lage school, but his schooldays were brief, coming to 
an end when he had reached the age of fourteen 
years, when he was apprenticed to a trade, as was 
customary at that day. Two years later he became 
a local preacher, and was received by Wesley into 
the itinerant ministry at twenty-two. When twenty- 
six years of age he came to America as a missionary. 



84 



Nation Builders 



Unused to woods and woodcraft, to the hardships 
and makeshifts of pioneer settlements and the perils 
of the almost unbroken frontier, he made himself 
master of this new art of semi-savage living, learned 
to follow a blazed trail, and to camp far from the 
habitations of men, and, indeed, in all things to con- 
form to the usages of the people among whom his 
lot was cast. 

When he came to America there was but one 
Methodist society having a stated place of worship 
— that in New York city — and in all the land the 
followers of John Wesley numbered not more than 
six hundred souls, scattered over two states. He 
lived to see the little handful increase to a multitude. 
As the first Methodist bishop to wear that title in 
America, he was at the head of every movement, 
either educational or ecclesiastical. He traveled 
— at a day when to travel meant unbroken roads 
and saddlebags — over two hundred and seventy 
thousand miles, visiting every part of the country 
where the foot of a white man had strayed, braving 
forest, mountain, and swamp with dauntless cour- 
age, preaching above sixteen thousand sermons, and 
converting an unnumbered host. In the ranks of 
the workers of all the ages there are few who can 
claim a right to stand beside Bishop Asbury. 

We have but commenced the story of his labors. 
He ordained during the successive years of his mill- 



Some of the Sowers 



85 



istry four thousand preachers, each one of whom 
was as a torch lighted in a dark place. He presided 
at two hundred and twenty-four Conferences. He 
laid the foundation of the first Methodist college, 
and worked with all his great strength for the estab- 
lishment of a comprehensive educational system, 
to be extended to every district throughout the land. 
There was often a Pauline cast to his adventures, 
and certainly a strong suggestion of the great apostle 
to the Gentiles in his character. To the end of his 
long life he remained single, being of the opinion 
that a wife might distract his attention from his 
work. He was a mighty organizer, a general, the 
man most needed for the American branch of 
Wesley's following. 

While Asbury may have lacked the almost peril- 
ous sublimation of Wesley's more exalted moods, 
which were at times too mystical for popular com- 
prehension, and while he certainly did not follow 
him into those awful depths of doubt and despond- 
ency into which the great leader was prone to 
plunge, yet one may question if his more normally 
balanced temperament and wisely controlled intel- 
lect did not make him a better and safer leader for 
the men of the new country. American Methodism, 
that great system, solid to withstand the world and 
sufficiently elastic to embrace Christendom, fine in 
its conception and magnificent in its results, was 



86 



Nation Builders 



largely the work, under Providence, of Bishop 
Asbury, or at least was planned under the immedi- 
ate direction of his genius. If success is to be 
measured by the extent to which a man accomplishes 
the object that lies nearest to his heart, then Francis 
Asbury must be accounted one of the most suc- 
cessful men that America has ever known, though, 
like his Master, he was poor in purse and often had 
not where to lay his head. He died at Spottsyl- 
vania, Virginia, March 31, 181 6. 

Bishop Asbury's views on the itinerancy were 
strong, his expression of them unequivocal. Soon 
after his landing in America he wrote : "At present 
I am dissatisfied. My brethren seem unwilling to 
leave the cities (that is, in the winter season), but 
I think I shall show them the way. ... I am in 
trouble, and more trouble is at hand, for I am de- 
termined to make a stand against all partiality. I 
have nothing to seek but the glory of God, nothing 
to fear but his displeasure." 

The bishop's way of making appointments showed 
that inexorable, soldierly bent of character that was 
one of his strong qualifications for leadership. He 
first studied the characters and temperaments of 
the men to be appointed. Next, he made as careful 
a survey of the ground as possible, traveling annu- 
ally thousands of miles to accomplish this end. 
Finally, having fitted the laborer to his field accord- 



Some of the Sowers 



87 



ing to his own best judgment, he made the matter 
the subject of earnest prayer for guidance. His 
resolve once formed, nothing of an ordinary char- 
acter was suffered to interfere with it. He made 
his list of appointments with almost despotic power, 
but with a conscientious regard for the great work 
of the church. All recognized that he was but the 
servant of the work, at one in that regard with the 
youngest and most obscure man in the ranks. 

He showed the highest confidence in the preachers, 
his beloved brethren, by treating them exactly as 
he treated himself — without consideration. At the 
end of a Conference the bishop read without com- 
ment or interruption the list of appointments, the 
preparation of which had cost him labor and 
thought, tears and prayers without limit or number. 
Sometimes with trembling voice he read, knowing 
the hardships and dangers to which his word would 
commit these dear laborers, but always inexorably. 
When the last name was read, it has been told, he 
turned at once to the door, where his horse stood 
saddled, and rode away to avoid possible discussion 
or appeal. 

It is a matter of history that Asbury found the 
itinerant feature of the Wesleyan work in America 
already disappearing when he arrived, and that he 
revivified it. Dr. Daniels says: "Beyond all doubt 
this young Englishman, by his sagacious manage- 



88 



Nation Builders 



ment of this very question, saved the cause of Meth- 
odism in America from early and inglorious death, 
. . . Colonial Methodism and a settled ministry 
were entirely incompatible." The Methodist preach- 
ers got to be known as the saddlebag men. The 
two requisites to a clerical equipment were a horse 
and a Bible. Some one has said that after asking 
if a candidate had the grace of God in his heart, 
and the ability to preach or exhort, the very next 
question always was, "Has he a horse?" Without 
the latter it would have been next to impossible to 
traverse the wilderness. For half a century after 
Asbury's advent the gospel was on horseback in 
America. 

One reads with amazement some of the records 
of the hardships and dangers of the early circuit 
riders. Like a page from some old saga comes the 
account of Burke's ride, from appointment to ap- 
pointment, through a country swarming with hostile 
red men, when the settlers gathered in blockhouses 
or behind palisades, rifle in hand. During the 
Cherokee War the preacher was near the French 
Broad River and was warned that it would prob- 
ably mean death to him to sally forth on his circuit. 
At his first appointment he found the people gath- 
ered with direful accounts of a large force of sav- 
ages within the limits of the settlement. Neverthe- 
less, having got what hearing he could at the first 



Some of the Sowers 89 

and not losing his life, he set out for the second 
appointment, on the south bank of the Little River. 
Two men were found who offered to pilot him 
through the woods; but the evidences of danger 
multiplied till they were driven back to protect their 
families, and the preacher went on alone. 

The next settlement was also alarmed, and Burke 
was met by a crowd of eager men and women en- 
gaged in strengthening the defenses of their houses. 
They were too busy to listen to preaching. The 
tales of Indian atrocities, which are merely literature 
to most of us, were terrible realities to the people 
of the frontier of that day. With almost frantic 
haste they gathered material for defense as long as 
the light lasted, and when night came sat down in 
the darkness, not daring to make a light, each man 
with his rifle in his hand. 

Finding this frightened flock unable to compre- 
hend the words he spoke to them, Burke set out 
again, traveling by night so as to avoid the savages, 
and leading his horse over a great part of the way. 
Stealing through the forest in the dark, on foot and 
alone, from danger to danger, this intrepid member 
of a heroic band followed the path of duty without 
question, though to say that he was without fear 
would indicate an almost insensible mind. 

At length, still under cover of the darkness, he 
succeeded in reaching the settlement he sought, and 



9 o 



Nation Builders 



there found himself face to face with a new danger, 
as the inhabitants thought him an Indian, trying to 
decoy them, and prepared to "fill him full of lead." 
Finally a woman recognized the preacher's voice, 
and he was admitted. After the natural expressions 
of amazement at the risks that a Methodist preacher 
would take to fill his appointments, the people lis- 
tened attentively while he preached and prayed with 
them. The next day, in spite of their protests, he 
proceeded upon his circuit. On his next round the 
brave itinerant found to his deep sorrow that all 
of the people at that place had been murdered by 
the savages, though he had escaped, through a coun- 
try swarming with them, without the slightest 
injury. 

Bishop Asbury was frequently exposed to the 
same dangers which at this distance of time add a 
romantic charm to the story of his colaborers. Upon 
one occasion, having reason to fear an Indian at- 
tack while upon his way to a Conference, he and a 
few companions stretched a rope around their tem- 
porary stopping place, with the idea of tripping any 
stealthy foe who might try to approach under cover 
of darkness. Each man, except those on sentinel 
duty, slept with the bridle of his horse around his 
arm, and so a night in the forest was passed, but 
without attack. Despite the fact that they were dis- 
turbed and harrassed by the way, the bishop and 



Some of the Sowers 91 



his little cortege reached the Conference in safety, 
though the country was alive with hostile foes and 
every week brought its record of atrocities. 

The discouragements that beset the preacher were 
not always in the way of physical obstacles or dan- 
gers. It took peculiar force and nerve to compel 
the attention of an indifferent or even hostile audi- 
ence. Some of the younger and more diffident 
preachers must have gone through a purgatorial 
experience on some of the wilder circuits. It is 
told of the great McKendree, afterward a bishop, 
that when upon his first circuit he made so unfavor- 
able a first impression that a brother who was to be 
his host openly expressed his disgust. "What will 
they send us next?" he burst out. The young 
preacher heard him, and was quite ready to share 
the unfavorable opinion. He preached in fear and 
trembling, and without much edification. As he did 
not afterward appear at the house, his host went to 
hunt him up, and found him at the scene of his 
defeat, sitting dejectedly, with his head in his hands. 
He wanted nothing to eat, he said. He felt that 
he was a failure, and he could not summon courage 
to face the people. After some persuasion he fol- 
lowed his host home, and there agreed with him 
that he would better make arrangements to leave the 
field to some better man. However, while going 
to cancel his appointments he was persuaded, by 



92 



Nation Builders 



some people who were more hungry for preaching 
than critical as to its quality, to try again. The re- 
sult was exactly the reverse of what he anticipated. 
McKendree stayed in his circuit, and the Methodist 
Church was fortunate in this preservation of one of 
her strongest and most useful men. 

Among the preachers whom Asbury ordained, 
or who were his colaborers at the meeting of the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were not a few 
who were his very antithesis in personality and 
method. Among these was one who combined much 
native shrewdness and a ready if rough eloquence 
with consuming zeal. 

Benjamin Abbott was a Pennsylvanian, unedu- 
cated, but zealous, who preached in a sort of phrensy 
that was communicated to his hearers. He carried 
the sword of fire, and, with the stern demeanor of 
an avenging spirit, wielded it till he had driven his 
audience to the smoking edge of the bottomless pit 
before extending to them the olive branch of divine 
mercy. He proclaimed that "God without Christ 
is a consuming fire," and that fire was to him so 
real and overwhelming that it was no unusual thing 
for the hearers to be thrown into convulsions or for 
the preacher to faint from the excess of his emotion. 

One of the incidents of his preaching has been 
related somewhat as follows : A young man standing 
near a blazing wood fire fell in a fit as Abbott de- 



Some of the Sowers 



93 



picted the torments of the lost, and he narrowly 
missed being burned, his companions with difficulty 
rescuing him. A young Quaker girl was singled 
out for reprobation because she did not show any 
sign of penitence. At a funeral the preacher took 
advantage of the awe and fear occasioned by a ter- 
rific thunderstorm to set before his trembling hearers 
the awful coming of the Lord. Sudden streams of 
lightning illuminated the house, and the incessant 
thunder shook it to its foundations. "Who knows/' 
cried the vehement evangelist, "but that the Lord 
may descend with the next clap of thunder!" With 
that, his journal tells us, the people began to cry and 
scream and fell all around the house. Fourteen 
years afterward he found in that place twelve active 
Christians who dated their conversion from that 
time and occasion. 

Robert Southey says of him: "Abbott seems to 
have been a sincere and well-meaning enthusiast, 
on the verge of madness himself," which seems al- 
most as fanatical as the rough-and-ready methods 
that he reprobates ; but presently this note is added : 
"The fermentation of Methodism will cease in 
America as it has ceased in England, and even dur- 
ing its effervescence the good which it has produced 
is greater than the evil." Perhaps it was difficult 
for Southey to entertain a just view of revival 
methods as foreign as those of Abbott to his culti- 



94 



Nation Builders 



vated, aesthetic taste, but he testified again and again 
to the tangible results of the work and the unselfish 
zeal of the workers in that early awakening. 

Abbott was once rebuked by a broad-brimmed 
listener, who objected to his realistic portrayal of 
avenging justice on the ground that the Lord was 
not in the earthquake nor the whirlwind, but in the 
still small voice. The preacher retorted: "Do you 
know that the earthquake is the mighty thunder of 
God's voice from Mount Sinai ? It is the divine law 
to drive us to Christ. And the whirlwind is the 
power of conviction, like the rushing of a mighty 
wind, tearing away every false hope and stripping 
us of every plea." Commenting on this reply, 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge commends it, but adds 
that it would have been still better if he had told 
his Quaker critic that it was by God's ordinance that 
the earthquake and the whirlwind should go before 
the still small voice. 

Certain it is that in the early days of Methodism 
the penitent stood, as he was expected to stand, as 
in the cave of Horeb, and felt the very foundations 
of his soul shaken, before receiving the word of 
peace. The violence of Abbott and his companions 
had an effect upon untaught, unreflecting, unregen- 
erate men that we cannot conceive would have been 
accomplished by milder methods. The robust, un- 
compromising insistence that the natural heart is at 



Some of the Sowers 



95 



enmity with God, and that such enmity is a neces- 
sarily fatal struggle against just and irresistible 
wrath, led to results that all the milder preachments 
of modern pulpits never could have attained. To 
criticize the primitive methods of Abbott and those 
like him upon the ground that their treatment was 
heroic invites the retort that they believed the disease 
to be violent, and that a church which accepts the 
sacrifice of the Lamb of God for sin and does not 
treat sin as the greatest imaginable calamity belittles 
its own creed. The evangelists reached all classes 
of people, from the small city or town of the older 
state to the lonely dwellers in the depths of the 
forest. We read that "the fine, the gay, threw 
off their ruffles, their rings, their earrings, their 
feathers." The first years of civil liberty were 
marked by an astonishing renaissance of spiritual 
life, which has produced a marked effect upon the 
character of the American people and the stability 
of the American government. 

Among what might now appear the humors of 
that early day of frontier work and sacrifice, though 
certainly the actors and narrators saw nothing hu- 
morous in the situation, was the capture of a Pres- 
byterian meeting by a couple of Methodist preachers 
and the conversion of a quiet and reposeful session, 
"where there had been some show of interest/' into a 
tempestuous revival scene. Not that the Methodist 



9 6 



Nation Builders 



preachers were intruders or imagined themselves 
to be so. On the contrary, the Presbyterian brothers 
seemed to have insisted upon one of the visitors 
preaching a sermon. But, once started, they did 
not stop for a moment to consider the customs or 
prejudices of the church family whose guests they 
were. 

William Burke, who was the foremost on that 
occasion, said afterward : "I took for my text, 'To 
you is the word of this salvation sent/ and before 
I concluded there was a great trembling among the 
dry bones. Great numbers fell to the ground and 
cried for mercy, old and young. Brother Lakin 
followed with one of his then powerful exhorta- 
tions, and the work increased. The Presbyterian 
ministers stood astonished, not knowing what to 
make of such a tumult. Brother Lakin and myself 
proceeded to exhort and pray with them. Some 
obtained peace with God before the meeting broke 
up. This was the first appearance of the revival 
in the Presbyterian Church/' 

The Presbyterian ministers who "stood aston- 
ished" at such an exhibition of good Methodist 
fervor and zeal form a picture which the mind con- 
templates with keen enjoyment. We would gladly 
know just what they might have said about the 
event if they had left any record of it. 

Among the strongest and most useful men in 



Some of the Sowers 



97 



the Methodist connection there seemed at the outset 
little inclination to take up the cudgels on doctrinal 
points unless forced to do so by direct attack. In- 
deed, we may readily understand that men whose 
preparation for the ministry did not ever include 
the curriculum of a theological school and seldom 
got beyond the great fundamental truths of Chris- 
tian belief were not particularly anxious to meet an- 
tagonists shotted to the muzzle with the tenets of 
Geneva and Westminster. For the most part we 
think there is every evidence that the first genera- 
tion or two of the Methodist preachers had all that 
they could attend to without courting theological 
dissensions. But when the occasion came they 
could draw the lines close and stand up with grim 
courage and determination to do battle for their 
views. 

When some Presbyterians demanded how certain 
doctrines were held by their Methodist friends, on the 
eve of a communion service which was to have been 
a union one, the challenge was accepted with a fine 
Old Testament emphasis. The cry rang out over 
the Methodist host: "Every man to his tent, O 
Israel. " And every man was required to give a pub- 
lic declaration of his belief in certain doctrines. At 
a later day polemical discourses were in vogue, and 
bitter denunciations of other members of the family 
of Christ became the fashion — a fashion which 



9 8 



Nation Builders 



nearly all Protestant churches followed in a not 
very distant past. 

There seemed to be no limit to the activity of 
some of the sturdy men who built the foundation 
walls of our social institutions. The specializing 
tendency of the present day makes it more likely 
that a man shall know part of one trade or pro- 
fession than that he shall profess a mastery of sev- 
eral; but at the commencement of the century of 
which we have seen the final years it was not so. 
We read of men who were farmers, soldiers, legis- 
lators, and merchants, with what the commercial 
slang of to-day would designate as a "side line" of 
teaching, surveying, or preaching. Yet even among 
his contemporaries William Beauchamp must have 
passed as a man of unusual activity, if we are to 
credit the list of his vocations that has been trans- 
mitted to us. He was, we are told, a physician, law- 
yer, surveyor, man of letters, schoolmaster, me- 
chanic, and Methodist preacher — besides incident- 
ally running a farm. After his first years in the 
itinerant ranks he retired with broken health to 
his farm, but afterward recuperated sufficiently to 
return to the harness, and after a year in Saint Louis 
was made presiding elder of the Illinois Circuit. 
Here he remained till overwork again mastered a 
feeble constitution, and he sank under his labors. 

Reserved toward strangers, deliberate in manner 



Some of the Sowers 99 



till aroused by the pressure of emotion or the de- 
mands of his calling, thin, with pleasing though not 
remarkable features and auburn hair, Beauchamp 
was not as impressive a figure as some of his associ- 
ates in the ministry. Cartwright, for example, by his 
homeliness and brawn attracted attention, as Asbury 
did by his almost apostolic presence, and Bascom, 
a little later, by his personal charm. But Beauchamp 
had two very important physical qualifications for 
his work : his eyes, hazel in color, became keen and 
piercing when his mind was aroused by the presence 
of an audience or an opponent, and his voice was 
capable of great expression. It trembled in tender- 
ness and rang in argument or denunciation. Yet 
with the power of the orator he always exhibited 
the intellectual control of the scholar. Beauchamp's 
manner of preaching, we are told, was not ornate, 
but rather distinguished on ordinary occasions by 
simplicity. His discourses were not calculated to 
rouse the transient emotions of an audience so much 
as to produce a lasting impression. "There was 
seldom a shout raised in the assembly under his 
preaching, but always strict attention paid to his 
discourses, with every eye fixed upon the speaker 
and frequently the people all bathed in tears," says 
one biographer. 

William Beauchamp was the author of several 
books that had a wide circulation in their day, and 
LGf.G, 



100 



Nation Builders 



his scholarly attainments were recognized by a large 
circle of his contemporaries. He missed an election 
to the episcopacy by but a few votes, but, as it 
turned out, he could not have served in that capacity, 
as the fatigue of attending the Conference brought 
on an attack of illness from which he died in a few 
weeks. 

This man, who was accounted an able and suc- 
cessful Methodist preacher, presents an antithesis 
to the popular idea of the uncouth, uneducated, 
rough-and-ready shouter who used to be the stock 
subject of newspaper and almanac wit. It is a 
great mistake to suppose that all of the men who 
spent their lives in this cause were rough timber, 
fit only for rough purposes. From the first, when 
the Wesleys and Whitefield came out of Oxford 
with the message of the cross, there have been men 
of signal ability and liberal culture in the ranks. 

One of the most marked examples of a union 
of the qualities which attract people of all classes 
was to be found in Jesse Lee, a Virginian who was 
ambitious to evangelize the people of Boston. More 
than a hundred years ago, in the spring of 1790, 
Bishop Asbury listened to his importunity, and dis- 
patched him for his self-chosen field of labor. He 
was then thirty-two years old, and was converted 
when fifteen years old under one of the few evangel- 
ical Episcopal ministers that his native state could 



Some of the Sowers ioi 

boast at that time. Previous to his invasion of Bos- 
ton young Lee had accompanied Bishop Asbury on a 
tour in the South, and there won the respect as well 
as the regard of the great bishop, who realized 
that there was in his companion a capacity for 
extraordinary success. 

The idea of a missionary from Virginia to Bos- 
ton! In the opinion of the men of Boston it was 
monstrous or absurd; they were not quite sure 
whether they should be indignant or amused at such 
impudence. 

It has been happily said of Lee that his education 
was not so large as the uses which he made of it. 
He was a man of much more than the ordinary 
height, one who towered above other men physically, 
and his mental stature seemed to correspond with 
his bodily presence. In manner he had the polish 
which was once thought hardly attainable by a man 
born outside of the Old Dominion, and his ready 
wit saved him from discomfiture in many a novel 
situation. An old lady asked him if he had had a 
liberal education. That was in Connecticut. "Tol- 
erably liberal," was the reply; "enough, I think, to 
carry me through the country." A minister of an- 
other denomination had been applied to by Lee for 
permission to preach in his church. But was he a 
man of college training? Of course it would not 
do for the pulpit of a New England church to open 



102 



Nation Builders 



its doors to one who lacked the hall-mark of schol- 
arship. So the resident minister slyly tried the ap- 
plicant with a question in Greek. Now, it happened 
that Lee did not know any Greek ; but he was for- 
tunately acquainted with some North Carolina 
Dutch that he had picked up while in the South, 
and he gravely replied in that. His interlocutor 
was not inclined to press his investigation further, 
for he concluded that the language he listened to 
was Hebrew, in which he himself was deficient. 

In Connecticut, according to the historians of the 
church, Lee was frequently treated with rudeness, 
sometimes amounting to violence. The clergymen 
were inimical to him, and he had difficulty in finding 
any church to receive him ; but he finally managed, 
in spite of the opposition, to establish a circuit which 
in the following year he left in the hands of Jacob 
Brush, George Roberts, and Daniel Smith. 

Before proceeding to Boston he explored Massa- 
chusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, where to 
his great delight he fell in with another of the rare 
spirits of that day, Freeborn Garrettson. Finally 
arriving in Boston, Lee found it impossible to ob- 
tain a house to preach in. The pulpits with one 
accord closed their doors against him, and he had 
no means with which to procure a place for him- 
self. In this emergency he availed himself of the 
liberty afforded by Boston Common, and on that 



Some of the Sowers 



103 



famous green, under the shade of a hospitable elm, 
standing upon a table that he succeeded in borrow- 
ing, he preached his first sermon to a Boston audi- 
ence. The audience was there. A few gathered 
at first, drawn by curiosity to hear this big, hand- 
some man, whose voice rang like a cornet. Then a 
crowd assembled. One who was present on the 
first occasion said afterward that it was a common 
opinion that no such man had visited New England 
since the days of Whitefield. Two or three thou- 
sand people heard him at that commencement of his 
Boston ministry, and the audiences continued to 
flock to the old elm throughout the summer. Finally 
he built in Boston a Methodist meetinghouse with 
money which came, in part at least, from Virginia. 

Lee preached at Lynn and established there the 
first regular Methodist society in Massachusetts, 
which from February to May, 1791, grew to sev- 
enty members. In 1791 he was appointed elder 
of the New England District and assigned to Litch- 
field. With him were eleven circuit preachers, cov- 
ering one district and six circuits, all established 
in the short time since Lee had been sent by Asbury 
into the Eastern states. The following year the 
first Conference in New England was held at Lynn. 
Shortly after that extensive revivals were reported 
throughout the region in which Elder Lee had la- 
bored. Rainor had a good story to tell of awaken- 



104 



Nation Builders 



ings on the Hartford Circuit, and the work spread 
as far as Albany, in New York State. That year 
showed a gain of about nine hundred souls for the 
new Conference, the total membership being one 
thousand three hundred and fifty-eight. 

Let no one pass the preceding paragraph over as 
a dry statement of uninteresting figures. To read 
between the lines of such meager data as Confer- 
ence reports often give us will show by what un- 
tiring zeal, what almost superhuman energy, the 
Methodist Church pushed forward to occupy the 
land. The evangelist was a sort of flying wedge, 
and no sooner had he made the slightest impression 
upon the district assigned him than the reinforce- 
ments were flung in to his support with an energy 
and generalship that were admirable. Had Bishop 
Asbury been a military leader instead of head shep- 
herd in the Methodist Church, his genius would 
have won him a high place among the famous com- 
manders of history. 



CHAPTER V 

From Cabin to Camp Meeting 

The American pioneer of 1800 was a poorer man 
in all things that we consider essential to life than 
is the meanest "tarheel" that drags out his existence 
in a slab shanty in the Carolina pine belt to-day. 
The least prosperous American of the twentieth 
century can sometimes at least command the use 
of matches, the sight of a newspaper, the care of 
a physician, the service of the postal system, or 
the protection of a court of law, not one of 
which advantages came within the reach or the 
knowledge of any of those who broke a path into 
the wilderness toward the Mississippi ten decades 
ago. The barrenness of the lives of the pioneers 
can hardly be conceived by the reader of this gen- 
eration. The home of the frontiersman was a rough 
shack of logs, daubed with clay, and often roofed 
with bark till shingles, laboriously made by hand, 
could be prepared. No cave man's den nor bush- 
man's hut could be more barren of ornament than 
such a cabin. The path that led to its door was a 
trail seldom trodden by other feet than those of its 
occupants, and the wind that whistled through the 



106 Nation Builders 

chinks of the walls or drove the snow through the 
unglazed windows commonly brought no other 
sounds than the howl of the wolves or the wail of 
the panther. 

Let us imagine a state of society in which each 
household must depend upon its own members for 
all the advantages commonly belonging to com- 
munal life. It is true, as will be noticed elsewhere 
in these pages, that the frontier settlers were fre- 
quently driven to cluster in small groups of two 
or three or even half a dozen shanties, which became 
the nuclei of future settlements, but it is also true 
that even in these embryo hamlets there was rarely 
an attempt to infringe upon absolute personal lib- 
erty of action by any form or pretense of social law. 

The frontiersman expected to defend himself and 
his family from aggression, to avenge real or imag- 
ined injuries, and to fight out his own quarrels 
without recourse to any organized system of social 
protection. It is not necessary for us to go back 
a century for illustrations of the evil results of this 
mode of life. Its survival in the wilder regions of 
the Southwest is still marked by the blood feud, 
or vendetta, by which the settlement of fierce ani- 
mosities is left by popular consent to the members 
of the families concerned. The pioneer was in all 
matters that affected his own safety, or even his 
own convenience, judge, jury, and police in one per- 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting 107 

son. If he acted in concert with his neighbors it 
was under the pressure of some immediate and ex- 
traordinary emergency, and such associations sel- 
dom became permanent. If it chanced that several 
cabins were clustered together for greater protec- 
tion against Indian foes they were sometimes sur- 
rounded by a palisade or other defense of logs, and 
under the stress of a common danger the long rifles 
cracked side by side. 

Education under those circumstances meant at 
best the barest rudiments of book knowledge, im- 
parted at the mother's knee. Schools were abso- 
lutely unknown upon the frontier, and even the 
larger settlements were frequently innocent of any 
attempt to instruct the young. What material things 
a man possessed were the products of his own or his 
wife's skill in manufacture. The house, furniture, 
utensils, clothing, food — all they had or used were 
of their own making, raising, or killing. If a man 
wanted clothing he killed a beast and prepared its 
fur or its hide for his use. To realize what such 
clothing meant let anyone take even the softest 
buckskin, dressed without mechanical appliances, 
and wear it next the skin after it has once or twice 
been wet by rain or snow and dried in hard creases 
and ridges. Such garments could only be used by 
people whose bodies were inured to the hardening 
processes of a life of constant exposure. As in the 



io8 



Nation Builders 



case of savage tribes, the weak died young, and the 
survivors were the progenitors of a race of uncom- 
mon stature and physical hardness. The women 
spun and wove wool or flax into coarse fabrics to 
fashion their rude garments, and when occasion 
required they could aid their husbands or brothers 
with ax and rifle. The pioneer settlers fought with 
savages for a foothold on their land; fought the 
forest and the soil for a bare subsistence; fought 
their fellows for such advantages as they could 
hope to gain; and, generally, did not know 
enough to comprehend that they were ignorant and 
poor. 

The cotton gin was not introduced; the butcher 
and the grocer had not arrived upon the scene ; the 
art of lighting a fire had not passed the elementary 
stage of flint and steel, and if a man lacked these 
necessary adjuncts to cabin life he toiled for a potful 
of fire to his nearest neighbor, or, lacking a neigh- 
bor, he shivered and starved. Sometimes faint 
echoes reached the frontiersman of a world some- 
where beyond his mountains and forests. He knew 
that there were in the world larger affairs than 
those that employed him, something greater than 
his meager and soul-starving routine of border life, 
and that there were larger men who managed those 
more important matters ; but it did not occur to him 
that he had any interests in common with those far- 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting 109 

distant men or that their rise or fall could matter 
to him. 

The pioneer settlers formed the raw material for 
the making of new states, but they were not in 
any true sense state builders till an influence came 
to them and an idea was planted and cultivated 
among them by men whose thought, whose stand- 
ards of conscience, whose conceptions of duty and 
responsibility, of law and morality, of life in all 
its wonderful meaning, were absolutely new to 
them. It was this new influence that moved from 
cabin to cabin, that was carried like an endless cord 
through all the intricate ways of forest and moun- 
tain, of valley and river, till it bound into one sym- 
pathetic body the widely segregated units of that 
strangely hidden population. 

A quarter of a century earlier the settler had 
himself perhaps seen something of the conflict that 
at its close had left thirteen worn and impoverished 
colonies free from British control, but not yet con- 
scious of the meaning or the potentiality of the 
liberty they had achieved. Through the anteroom of 
a loose and imperfect confederation the people of the 
land were to go forward, like wondering, irresolute 
children, into a union of sovereign states. The con- 
cept of a federal government had not become habit- 
ual to more than a respectable minority of the 
people, even in the larger cities and towns. The 



110 



Nation Builders 



settlements, far removed from the seaboard and 
from one another, were without means of commu- 
nication, were out of touch with the world and its 
thought; and the pioneer, fighting his lonely battle 
for existence at the very borders of Christendom, 
stood much nearer in knowledge to his savage 
vis-a-vis than to the associates of Hamilton and 
Jefferson. 

It was just at that point that the great though 
unrealized danger to the future of the Southern and 
Western states lay. Not the men of the seaboard 
cities, where law and order were recognized, where 
education was fostered and religion had won its 
converts, but the untaught, lawless, primitive men 
of the settlements were to leave their impress upon 
western Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and the vast 
continent beyond. 

Never was isolation more complete. By the year 
1800 a population of over three hundred thousand 
souls had drifted with the tributaries of the Ohio 
or sifted through the ravines of the Cumberland 
Mountains on the trail of Boone into the forests and 
the fertile valleys of Tennessee and Kentucky, and 
had dropped out of sight for the most part as com- 
pletely as though they had marched into the sea. 
To the majority of them no post rider ever brought 
tidings of the outer world or carried their messages. 
No news sheet ever reached them. No public 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting hi 

speaker ever drew them together except for the rare 
occasions of worship. 

It is so necessary to understand the completeness 
of that isolation from the world's great interests 
and the growing sentiment of national life in order 
to appreciate the vast service performed by any in- 
telligent agent who should at more or less regular 
intervals visit and instruct those outlying units of 
population, that we have been somewhat particular 
and minute in our description of earlier frontier 
life. A committee of Congress, reporting in 1800 
upon the Nortlrwest Territory, which it was then 
proposed to divide into three prospective states, 
made the astounding statement that "in the three 
Western countries there has been but one court hav- 
ing cognizance of crimes for five years, and the 
immunity which offenders experience attracts, as to 
an asylum, the most vile and abandoned criminals, 
and at the same time deters useful and virtuous 
citizens from making settlement in such a society." 

Peter Cartwright, from whom we quote more at 
length in another place, described his father's home 
in Logan County, Kentucky, as a haunt for refugees 
from justice, so that the place was called "Rogues' 
Harbor." He enumerates a delightful society of 
"murderers, horse thieves, highway robbers, and 
counterfeiters/' Two missionaries, traveling the 
country from western Pennsylvania westward to the 



112 



Nation Builders 



Mississippi and southward to New Orleans, in 1813, 
reported groups of population scattered over large 
areas of land, but no church nor any preacher. 

Elsewhere we have discussed the sources of popu- 
lation that led to the building of the country that 
up to 1830 was the West. For many years before 
the great areas under consideration were of the 
slightest importance as states the people — such peo- 
ple as we have described — were pouring into them. 
It is not necessary to point out that the population 
of a country does not of itself affect its political or 
social standing. The then frontier settlements of 
America were merely unworked lumps of humanity, 
waiting for the leaven that was in an incredibly 
short time to permeate them with life. 

In many sections of the Western country, as 
already noticed, a number of pioneers built near 
together, for protection against the attacks of sav- 
age foes. Sometimes a common fort, palisade, or 
blockhouse added to the security of such a com- 
munity. The Indian was certainly the most active 
agent in forcing the solitary pioneers into communi- 
ties, but there his services as a benefactor ceased. 
The community simply multiplied the vice and the 
ignorance of the individuals that composed it, if 
they chanced to be vicious and ignorant. Drunken- 
ness increased under the influence of conviviality, 
and crimes followed drunkenness. 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting 113 

That is not a pleasing picture of the early settler 
of the American frontier, but it is the only kind of 
a picture that observant men have left of him. His 
manners were as uncouth as his morals were un- 
wholesome, and altogether, divested of the softening 
tints of time and distance, he must have been as 
unattractive as the average squatter on the outskirts 
of civilization. Nevertheless there was good seed 
in that planting; good qualities that lay dormant 
under the weight of untoward circumstances, good 
faculties that belonged w T ith the splendid physique 
of the men and the robust health of the women, 
waited only for an awakening touch. 

Into some such typical exposition of squalor and 
poverty a lone rider on a jaded nag rode one day. 
His dress was that of any other frontiersman, 
partly homespun and partly leather or fur ; his hair 
hung long from the edge of a coonskin cap, and 
his flapping saddlebags carried all his worldly pos- 
sessions. In the place of a rifle he carried a Bible, 
and he came singing a song. 

Never in any page of history was there a more 
complete antithesis than that between the circuit 
rider, on fire with zeal, alive with a new, unfathom- 
able life, and jubilant in the possession of a great 
secret that it was his mission to impart, and the 
ignorant, brawny, inquisitive people that mingled 
with their often suspicious greeting a furtive sus- 



H4 



Nation Builders 



picion of his errand, and were not infrequently eager 
to try physical conclusions with him before they 
would listen to the message he brought. There 
were three things that the Methodist circuit rider 
never omitted. He prayed with his host or hostess, 
sang a hymn, and, if possible, added a word of 
exhortation; he unfolded his little stock of tracts 
and hymn books and tried to dispose of some of 
them; and he carefully inquired about the nearest 
neighbors and acquainted himself with all there was 
to know concerning them. Added to these essential 
features of the programme were the always welcome 
news of the outside world. 

Seated by the open hearth with the family of his 
host gathered around him and eagerly drinking in 
his words, he told of the marvelous things he had 
seen with his own eyes in that great city of Phil- 
adelphia where he had attended a General Confer- 
ence. He described the leaders of the church — 
Francis Asbury foremost — and spoke reverently of 
the work they were doing, unconsciously, perhaps, 
bringing the far-distant bounds of the country to- 
gether within such a comprehensive circle as his 
hearers had never before imagined. From such 
themes he probably drifted to more secular ones, 
telling who knows what startling items of recent 
intelligence. They knew the name of Washington 
even in the remotest cabin in the deepest wilderness, 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting 115 

and they were moved by something like grief to 
learn that he had breathed his last at his beautiful 
Mount Vernon ; nor did they lose a word of the tale 
of his obsequies. 

The differences of Hamilton and Adams with 
Jefferson and his party opened another world of 
ideas, brought the lands over-seas nearer, and de- 
fined America as a land with individual life, as 
opposed or contrasted with the life of other lands. 
The common interests of the people of America 
was a new and absorbing story. 

When the budget of strange tidings disclosed 
such marvels as the voyage of Fulton's Clermont 
down the Hudson, breathing fire and smoke, or the 
sad tragedy at Weehawken, when the great federal 
leader fell before the pistol of Aaron Burr, who can 
picture the deep absorption of listeners to whom the 
horizon of life was being widened for perhaps the 
first time. What the men of Philadelphia, Balti- 
more, Boston, or New York were, what they strove 
for and stood for, was novel refreshment for starved 
minds. What the men of the nearest settlement, 
fifty miles away, were doing was almost as strange. 

Candles were an unknown luxury, the place of 
which was filled by a light-wood knot stuck in the 
chimney flank; and such a torch must have lighted 
many a strange group, of which the traveling 
preacher was the center. 



n6 



Nation Builders 



In imagination we go back six centuries to pic- 
ture amid different surroundings and under differ- 
ent skies a similarly ignorant company. Lord and 
lady, thrall and franklin, gathering close to hear the 
marvelous tales of some palmer who had seen 
strange countries, or a minstrel who could recount 
strange tales in rhythm, to the accompaniment of 
a harp. The itinerant preacher was the palmer and 
the minstrel in one. He was the teacher, the news- 
monger, the living epistle calling men to a higher 
and more satisfying life, the link between scattered 
settlements and isolated cabins, and the bringer and 
singer of songs that were learned and remembered 
and sung long after the recollection of spoken words 
was indistinct. The songs learned in Cane Ridge 
were the same that were repeated in Boone; they 
swelled from the clearings on the Licking and rolled 
along the bluffs of the Cumberland. When the peo- 
ple assembled, under the influence and the impetus 
of a new faith, to praise God for the hope of sal- 
vation they all sang the same songs. In another 
chapter we will speak somewhat more fully of those 
songs of Zion, that had an incalculable influence 
in shaping the destinies of a people. 

The great camp meetings that early became a 
part of the religious life of the backwoods were 
a necessary outgrowth of the itinerancy. To a 
congregation covering twenty-five hundred square 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting 117 

miles, and possessing no church building, the open 
aisles of the forest were the only recourse. Every 
family in which an itinerant Methodist preacher 
gained a foothold became at once an important part 
of his flock, never afterward to be neglected or 
forgotten, and never suffered to be neglectful or to 
forget. When, having made the rounds and the 
acquaintance of every settler within his circuit, the 
preacher announced meetings at the most central 
points, he insisted that every member of his flock 
within a specified radius should be present, and he 
made it clear to them from the outset that the society 
was theirs and claimed their support. There was 
never a hint that any brother or sister was to be 
carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease. No 
drone was encouraged in those hives. 

Leaving aside for the moment the spiritual aspect 
of meetings at central places and camp meetings to 
which a larger neighborhood was summoned, we 
are brought face to face with the only less important 
social side of such gatherings. For the first time 
in their lives the backwoodsmen met a congregation 
of strangers, and met them upon a common ground, 
that induced sympathy and interest in their lives, 
their ideas, and their prospects. 

As strangers they came from long distances to 
clasp one another's hands and depart as brothers, 
and ever afterward to follow with interest the un- 



n8 Nation Builders 

folding of fortunes, the happiness or the grief of 
men and women who had till then been alien to 
them. 

The camp meeting, which in some sections of the 
country, in a scarcely modified form, has lasted to the 
present day, bore about the same relation to a stated 
appointment to preach that the mobilization of a state 
militia used to hold to a village train band. After 
families had been visited and societies formed and 
meetings held to clinch the work of private exhorta- 
tion, a great concourse of people from an area often 
covering parts of several states were summoned by- 
word of mouth to attend a general muster. The 
place chosen for such a meeting was often in the 
great level wood spaces, clear from underbrush or 
obstruction, which were once a feature of the South- 
western land. Toward such a rendezvous, as the 
advertised day drew near, the settlers approached 
by twos and threes, by companies, by platoons and 
regiments. Like rivulets in the mountains that flow 
into brooks and these again form rivers, so the drops 
of those great floods of population came together. 
Concentrating toward one point, it sometimes hap- 
pened that whole counties in Kentucky, Tennessee, 
and Ohio were depopulated, the inhabitants moving 
steadily toward the center, where, upon arrival, 
each man should build what shelter he could for 
his family, and swell a multitude such as few had 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting 119 

ever seen or imagined. Out of the woods, across 
the clearings, fry tens, by hundreds, by thousands, 
on foot, on horseback, or in rude carts, singing as 
they came, the newly enlisted cohorts of Methodism 
brought their individual experiences to cast them 
into the treasury of a great common faith. Never 
before in the history of the world had such congre- 
gations been gathered. Never before had they been 
possible. It is not safe to say that no other agency 
could have brought them together, but it is a his- 
toric fact that no other cause ever did. Not one 
of the great political demonstrations for which 
America has been famous, not even the great meet- 
ings that marked the controversial triumphs of Lin- 
coln and Douglas, ever did in this one respect what 
many of the great camp meetings of a century ago 
accomplished. Twenty thousand men and women 
of the frontier gathered in some of those assemblies. 
Some of them had taken days or even weeks to reach 
the ground. They had traveled over lands that were 
strange to them, had slipped down rivers that were 
new, had journeyed in company with chance com- 
panions whose faces and ways were alike unfamiliar. 
They gathered as settlers from the Kanawha or 
the Muskingum ; they returned home citizens of the 
Union. 

Among the formative influences which students 
of national history must measure there has been 



120 Nation Builders 



none more prompt and far-reaching in its effect 
upon the character of the republic than the Meth- 
odist camp meeting. 

James McGready, whose name should receive 
perpetual honor among Christians of all denomina- 
tions, was a devoted Presbyterian minister, who had 
come out from the East with a little handful of 
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from Pennsylvania and 
settled in Logan County, Kentucky. To his zeal 
has been attributed the first signs of the religious 
awakening in Kentucky. In 1799 the brothers Mc- 
Gee, William and John, one a Methodist and the 
other a Presbyterian, came together preaching the 
gospel in that country, and soon were followed by 
great congregations who gathered from far and 
near to listen to their preaching. The camp meet- 
ings that thus began in Logan County and in that 
part of the state were soon talked of throughout 
the border wherever men came together. The best 
account of the Logan County revival is that given 
by Barton Warren Stone, preacher at Cane Ridge, 
who was moved by the astonishing news to go and 
see for himself what was transpiring. His account 
is in part as follows : 

"There on the edge of a prairie in Logan County, 
Kentucky, the multitudes came together, and con- 
tinued for a number of days and nights encamped 
on the ground, during which time worship was car- 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting 121 

ried on in some part of the encampment. The scene 
was new to me and passing strange. It baffled de- 
scription. Many, very many, fell down as men slain 
in battle, and continued for hours together in an 
apparently breathless and motionless state, some- 
times for a few minutes reviving and exhibiting 
symptoms of life by a deep groan or a piercing 
shriek or a prayer for mercy fervently uttered. 
After lying there for hours they obtained deliver- 
ance. The gloomy cloud that had covered their 
faces seemed gradually and visibly to disappear, and 
hope, in smiles, brightened into joy. They would 
rise, shouting deliverance, and would then address 
the surrounding multitude in language truly elo- 
quent and impressive. With astonishment did I 
hear men, women, and children declaring the won- 
derful works of God and the glorious mysteries of 
the gospel." 

The recital of the scenes in Logan County deeply 
affected all of the Western people who heard of it, 
but the course of the emotional storm center, cyclonic 
as it was in swiftness and power, moved eastward, 
toward Cane Ridge, in Bourbon County. The peo- 
ple who listened to Mr. Stone with rapt and some- 
times tearful interest soon found themselves in the 
midst of a scene even more thrilling and remember- 
able. The greatest religious revival of modern 
times, greatest not only in its immediate religious 



122 



Nation Builders 



effect, but in the scope and vitality of its after influ- 
ence, had fairly commenced and was daily gaining 
headway. Stone again has left us a graphic record 
of the occurrences at Cane Ridge: 

"The roads were crowded with wagons, carriages, 
horses, and footmen, moving to the solemn camp. 
It was judged by military men on the ground that 
between twenty and thirty thousand persons were 
assembled. Four or five preachers spoke at the 
same time in different parts of the encampment 
without confusion. . . . We all engaged in singing 
the same songs, all united in prayer, all preached 
the same things. . . . The numbers converted will 
be known only in eternity. Many things transpired 
at the meeting which were so much like miracles 
that they had the same effect as miracles upon un- 
believers. By them many were convinced that Jesus 
was the Christ and were persuaded to submit to him. 
This meeting continued six or seven days and nights, 
and would have continued longer, but food for the 
sustenance of such a multitude failed. To this meet- 
ing had come many from Ohio and other distant 
parts. They returned home and diffused the same 
spirit in their respective neighborhoods." 

We see by this account, through the controlled 
and measured terms of which the enthusiasm of 
the narrator breaks in spite of himself, the impres- 
sion made by the Logan County and the Bourbon 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting 123 

County gatherings upon the mind of a Presbyterian. 
Kentucky has been from its early days a stronghold 
of the Presbyterians in America, and no clearer 
proof is needed of the vigor and fervor of their 
ministry than the evidence we have of their agency 
in commencing the revival of 1800 and contributing 
to the establishment of camp meetings. It is a fact 
that the Presbyterian and other ministers, with 
the exception of the Methodists, soon withdrew 
from any active part in the great open-air gather- 
ings that have since become so closely associated 
with Methodism and were for years one of the 
principal agencies in its upbuilding. William Burke's 
narrative of the great Cane Ridge revival gives still 
another point of view and must not be omitted : 

"Our next quarterly meeting was for Lexington 
Circuit, at Jesse Griffiths, Scott County. On Sat- 
urday we had some indications of a good work. 
On Saturday night we had preaching in different 
parts of the circuit, which at that time was the 
custom. . . . On Sunday morning they came in 
companies, singing and shouting on the road. . . . 
The work spread now into the several circuits. 
Salt River and Shelby were visited, and Danville 
shared the blessing. The Presbyterian Church 
caught the fire. Congregations were universally 
wakened up: McNamer's congregation on Cabin 
Creek, Barton Stone's at Cane Ridge, Reynolds's 



124 



Nation Builders 



near Ruddells Station and Paris, Rev. Mr. Lisle's 
at Salem, Mr. Rankin's at Walnut Hill," etc. 

He tells how the work extended into other coun- 
ties, to Ohio, to remote posts on the frontier. A 
meeting was "published" at Cane Ridge, and a whole 
population turned out to attend : 

"On Sunday morning, when I came on the 
ground, ... I fixed my stand in the open sun, with 
an umbrella affixed to a long pole and held over my 
head by Brother Hugh Barnes. I commenced read- 
ing a hymn with an audible voice, and by the time 
we concluded we had around us, by a fair calcula- 
tion, ten thousand people. . . . Toward evening I 
pitched the only tent on the ground. Having been 
accustomed to travel in the wilderness, I soon had 
a tent constructed out of poles and pawpaw bushes. 
Here I remained Sunday night and Monday night, 
and during the time there was not a single moment's 
cessation, but the work went on, and old and young, 
men, women, and children, were converted to God. 
It was estimated that on Sunday and Sunday night 
there were twenty thousand people on the ground. 
They had come from far and near, from all parts 
of Kentucky, some from Tennessee and from north 
of the Ohio River, so that tidings of the Cane Ridge 
meeting were carried to almost every corner of the 
country, and the holy fire spread in all directions." 

Even William Burke seems not to have seen the 



From Cabin to Camp Meeting 125 

great significance of this work in any other than 
a religious light. Was he oblivious to the fact that 
he was recording a process of state building? or 
did that fact to his zealous mind seem small beside 
the other? Twenty thousand people gathered from 
the four quarters of the compass at the call of the 
voice. Twenty thousand people went again to their 
wilderness homes with a new conception of their 
relationship to other men. Twenty thousand units 
of population had mastered the idea of Union. 

This work, repeated again and again, was as un- 
exampled in its effect as it has been unrecognized. 
Even if the labor of the preachers had achieved no 
higher result than this it would not have been 
wasted. Viewed from a purely political standpoint, 
it would have been a tremendous success; but, as 
we have had occasion to point out, the conversion 
of lawless people into law-abiding citizens was a 
constant corollary of the camp meeting and the re- 
vival service. 

To the making of the Union the men in whose 
piety, zeal, and discretion Francis Asbury trusted, 
who followed Burke into Ohio and penetrated the 
wilderness with Kobler and Poythress, Axley and 
Blackman and Cummins, contributed very largely 
— as broadly and effectually as any single agency, 
because their influence alone in their day could draw 
or did draw the people to a common center in a 



126 



Nation Builders 



common interest. If we seem to reiterate this truth 
unnecessarily let it be said in reply that we con- 
ceive it to be one of the most important historical 
facts of which American annals afford us any 
knowledge. The Methodist itinerants went among 
the people with a bond that drew strangers together 
into a close fellowship, and created sympathy be- 
tween individuals remote from each other in a geo- 
graphical sense; they also afforded a reason why 
people of different neighborhoods, counties, or even 
states, should meet with a common purpose and 
depart fired by a common enthusiasm. We have not 
found that any other agency in the early days of the 
republic performed this or any similar service. 



CHAPTER VI 
Frontier Women and Preachers' Wives 

When the saga of the old Methodist circuits is 
fully written, which is not likely to be possible till 
"the leaves of the judgment book unfold/' perhaps 
the tenderest and finest pages of that record will 
be devoted to the women who lived their unob- 
trusive lives and performed their unrecognized 
labors on the raw edge of the world. 

Leaving aside the obvious suggestion that with- 
out the pioneer women no frontier state could have 
been permanently established, aside from the nec- 
essary consideration of maternity, the wives of the 
woodsmen of the border states were the ready and 
efficient coadjutors of the saddlebag preachers, and, 
indeed, made their success possible. It was gener- 
ally a woman who bade the itinerant welcome, who 
prepared a meal and a bed for him, who first lis- 
tened to his preaching, and who most readily learned 
the songs that he sang. The women, then as now, 
were the great auxiliary force without whose aid 
the preacher would often find the accomplishment 
of his task impossible. 

How can we picture the woman of the backwoods 
more than a century ago? We know that even in 



128 



Nation Builders 



the larger towns and cities — even in Philadelphia, 
New York, Baltimore, or Boston — the richest dames 
in the most fashionable social circles could not com- 
mand many of the luxuries that have grown to be 
necessaries of life to people of the poorer sort in 
our day. The wife of the President or the ladies of 
her republican court knew nothing of a thousand 
little appliances for comfort that seem essential to 
people of very moderate means nowadays. Such 
matters of luxury as stationary bathtubs, hot and 
cold water, evenly heated houses, proper sanitary 
appliances, effectual lighting apparatus, and vari- 
ous labor-saving devices were undreamed of by 
Martha Washington or Dolly Madison, to say 
nothing of the less fortunate hosts of their fellow 
countrywomen. Candles lighted— or failed to light 
— the great echoing rooms ; warming pans made the 
stately four-poster a less dangerous and more com- 
fortable place to repose than the lee side of a barn 
in January ; a portable tin tub did duty at the usual 
Saturday night ablutions ; and the spit in the kitchen 
turned before a fire of crackling and smoking wood. 

The loom and the distaff were still domestic prop- 
erties, and the best-born damsel in the land would 
have thought it shame if she could not have at 
least lent a hand in the preparation of her own store 
of household linen and wedding finery. A wealthy 
woman of to-day will not uncommonly spend more 



Frontier Women 



129 



in a single hour than her prototype of Washington's 
time dared to squander in a whole season. It is 
safe to say that the wives and daughters of Boston's 
richest merchants and Philadelphia's most eminent 
lawgivers could never command as much of actual 
comfort in living as is now within the reach of the 
wife and daughter of any mechanic in those cities. 
Books were so rare that dame or damsel who had 
read half a hundred might be looked upon as a 
prodigious scholar. Our circulating libraries, our 
multiplying presses and ubiquitous publishing houses 
have changed all that. A century ago the printers 
and the editors clamored for rags with which the 
paper mills might be fed, and women were appealed 
to to save the rags for that purpose. The entire 
product of the paper mills in New England would 
not now print a single day's output of the Methodist 
Book Concern. 

If the great dames lived under conditions that 
none of their granddaughters would consider luxu- 
rious, what a lot of deprivations must have fallen 
to the women of less fortunate families, and what 
absolute barrenness of softness and comfort with- 
out question confronted the woman of the frontier ! 
To such meagerness the great emotional uplift that 
attended the preaching of the message of salvation 
must have resembled translation into a more benefi- 
cent world. Day by day the old grinding routine 



130 



Nation Builders 



of life: the piling of logs, the hauling of water, 
the preparation of new-killed meat, the grinding of 
corn between rough stones, and the droning of the 
spinning wheel — only these few things, over and 
over, daily, monthly, yearly, without cessation. Over 
the cabin the same woods that sheltered hundreds 
of bloodthirsty foes. Sometimes an arrow quiv- 
ered betw r een the chinks of the logs ; sometimes the 
rifle was taken from its pegs over the fireplace for 
instant service ; sometimes the flame of a neighbor's 
burning house could be seen through the trees, or 
a band of fugitives, survivors from some dreadful 
massacre, would stop to recruit their ranks. 

In this life, if the husband and the sons were 
brutal or recreant, the desolateness must have been 
unspeakable. At the best it was bad. When the 
preachers found such women, starved mentally, 
starved spiritually, possessing only that physical en- 
durance for which they have been famous, they un- 
folded to them the greatest of all stories, delighted 
their ears with songs the like of which they had 
never heard in all their secluded, hopeless lives, and 
pictured for them a heaven to whose joys and tri- 
umphs immediate possession was assured. 

A man, whose soul hunger was less keen, whose 
nature had not yet refused the daily diet of husks, 
might reject the kingdom of heaven, with its inesti- 
mable riches ; but few women could hold out against 



Frontier Women 



the wonder, the beauty, and the glory of the allur- 
ing prospect. Yesterday one might have stood 
dumb and weary by her cabin door, looking off into 
that never-changing prospect of somber trunks and 
inevitable shadows, listless and hopeless ; but to-day 
she has learned a new song and lives in a new world. 
Her eyes are lifted above the treetops ; her mind is 
lifted above the weary round of petty duties. She 
hears the soughing of the wind above the cabin as a 
challenge, and lilts back the major refrain : 

" My soul motinteth higher 
In a chariot of fire, 
And the moon it is under my feet." 

Everywhere, from the days of Dorcas, women 
have been the helpers of those who have had a mis- 
sion to preach, and they have been the efficient co- 
workers of the minister and the missionary. The 
more sluggish or more wary intelligence of the 
average man follows the initiative of the woman in 
most religious movements. 

It needs no argument to show the value of the 
position occupied by the pioneer women of the Meth- 
odist societies, nor will anyone who knows them or 
their work venture to suggest that they have sur- 
rendered aught of that initiative or that influence in 
a hundred years. 

The first rank of the preachers were frequently 
single men, though before long not a few of those 



132 



Nation Builders 



who were in the field added to their personal re- 
sponsibilities and cares by taking to themselves 
wives. The example set by Francis Asbury was one 
of celibacy, though whether he ever intended to 
make his own position in this respect a model for 
the younger men under his leadership is very doubt- 
ful. Certain it is that the tendency toward a mar- 
ried ministry increased greatly even during the great 
bishop's lifetime, and it has long been the rule in 
the Methodist Church. 

"The noble army of martyrs!" — was there ever 
a body of human beings who better deserved that 
name than the wives of numberless itinerant 
preachers who have moved, moved, moved up and 
down the land, from post to post, yearning for an 
abiding place and never finding one, longing vainly 
for the home security so dear to every woman's 
heart, and forever pulled away from the circle of 
friends to whom her heart w T as beginning to cling 
with the attachment of love ? 

"The noble army of martyrs praise Thee/' From 
every quarter of the land, East, West, North, and 
South, their lives are a sweet sacrifice, accompanied 
by the gratitude and the love of thousands to whom 
they have ministered. In estimating the influence 
of Methodism upon the religious thought and the 
moral advancement of the world the story of the 
wives of the preachers forms an important equation. 



CHAPTER VII 
Another Company of the Sowers 

A little later than Abbott, one of Asbury's most 
reliable and valued assistants and afterward himself 
a leader among American Methodists, Nathan 
Bangs challenges attention. It is possible that he 
should rank next to the pioneer bishop as a molding 
influence, closely identified as he was with the his- 
tory of his church for half a century. 

Nathan Bangs was born in Stratford, Connecti- 
cut, on the second of May, 1778. While still a boy 
he removed to Stamford, New York, in company 
with an older brother. As he grew to manhood he 
became a surveyor and schoolmaster, but hardly had 
he reached maturity when the appeal of an itinerant 
Methodist preacher, whose name is unfortunately 
lost to us, roused his dormant religious nature and 
disturbed his satisfaction with himself and his life. 
He was not converted at this time, though greatly 
troubled in conscience. His impulse seems to have 
been to escape from all reminders of a subject he 
would willingly have forgotten. Stamford was then 
almost upon the frontier. He resolved to go farther 
away, into still more uncivilized regions, where he 



134 



Nation Builders 



believed the traveling preacher would be unlikely to 
penetrate. He removed to Canada, and lived for 
a while in one of the lawless settlements that so often 
mark the outposts of civilization. Unsatisfied, rest- 
less, troubled at heart, we may believe that he did 
not hold aloof from the rude life around him. 

One day the inevitable itinerant preacher arrived. 
The Rev. Joseph Sawyer got hold of young Bangs, 
and the result was a new and powerful convert to 
Christianity and Methodism. There had evidently 
been strong opposition to the preacher and his mes- 
sage, for while we do not know the details of Mr. 
Sawyer's adventures, there is credible information to 
the effect that a bitter spirit of persecution assailed 
young Bangs at the very outset. He was an object 
of dislike to those among whom he had lived on 
terms of good feeling if not of good fellowship. 
He was boycotted, his means of earning a livelihood 
withdrawn, and violent opposition met all his efforts. 
Finally he was threatened with expulsion from the 
settlement. Under these conditions Nathan Bangs 
joined the ranks of the Methodist itinerants, and 
within a year received a license to exhort. Taking 
little provision and less anxiety for the perils of the 
way, he rode into the wilderness to carry the torch 
that he felt had been committed to him. 

There was something finer, deeper, and more 
abiding than picturesque knight-errantry in such 



Another Company of the Sowers 135 

a life, enlisted for such a quest. No one who loved 
a soft life or valued ease and safety could join the 
brotherhood of the itinerants. To its dangers and 
privations Bangs devoted himself with an enthusi- 
asm that outlived all deprivation and suffering. For 
many years he was part of that voice in the wilder- 
ness that proclaimed the kingdom of heaven at hand. 

More than once mobs of enraged men, whose 
practices he sternly rebuked, sought his life. His 
enemies laid wait for him in the woods to murder 
him, but he escaped from them. Frequently he 
went hungering to his sleep upon the moss under 
the trees in the forest. He fairly fought his way 
through icy storms from one settlement to another, 
consumed by a desire to deliver his message. Like 
many another of his brethren, before he had been 
a dozen years in the harness he could have equaled 
Saint Paul's list of casualties. He was a member 
of the New York Conference, which at the time 
of his admission included most of the settled portion 
of New York State, western Connecticut, Vermont, 
and Canada from Quebec to the settlements oppo- 
site Detroit. 

Ordained by Francis Asbury in 1804, three years 
after the great Cane Ridge revival, Bangs was ap- 
pointed to a Canadian circuit, at Thames River. 
The region was sparsely settled, infested with In- 
dians, and a stamping ground for fur traders, trap- 



136 



Nation Builders 



pers, half-breeds, and all the semicivilized classes 
that add so much to the pages of romance and de- 
tract in an equal ratio from the pleasures and safety 
of real life. In 1808 he returned to the states, be- 
ing appointed to the Delaware Circuit. From there 
he was ordered to the Albany Circuit, then to New 
York city, and in 181 2 to Montreal, but was pre- 
vented from filling the latter appointment by the war 
that was then in progress. In 18 13 Bangs was made 
presiding elder of the Rhinebeck District, which ex- 
tended from Rhinebeck, on the Hudson River, to 
Pittsfield, Vermont, and through Connecticut to 
Long Island Sound. That district is now divided 
into six. At that time there were three chapels in 
the whole territory. 

To relate the successive steps of Nathan Bangs's 
promotion can only serve to indicate his growing 
strength in the church and the confidence reposed in 
him by his colaborers. He was successively ap- 
pointed by the General Conference as Book Agent, 
editor of the Christian Advocate, and editor of the 
Methodist Quarterly, among his associates being the 
learned and eminent Bishop Emory. In 1836 he 
was appointed missionary secretary. In 1841 the 
presidency of the Wesleyan University was tendered 
to him and accepted. And when, in 1852, he retired, 
after fifty-one years of continuous service, he was 
regarded as one of the wisest and purest of the many 



Another Company of the Sowers 137 

men whose lives have been spent in the same high 
service. 

James Axley was one of the prominent men of 
the second generation of Methodist preachers, who 
dated their conversion from the great spiritual re- 
generation at the beginning of the century. Peter 
Cartwright and Samuel Parker were among those 
who, with Axley, presented themselves before the 
1804 Conference. A natural genius, eccentric and 
earnest, self-sacrificing and brusque, loved and 
feared, Axley made a notable place for himself in 
the Methodist van. Bishop Morris tells of his first 
meeting with him: 

"The following salutations were exchanged : 

" 'How are you, Brother Axley ?' 

" Who are you?' 

" 'My name is Thomas Morris/ 

"Then, surveying me from head to foot, he re- 
plied, 'Upon my word, I think they were hard pushed 
for bishop timber when they got hold of you.' " 

Yet those two became fast friends, and the bishop 
records that "every hour that I could redeem from 
Conference and council business was enlivened by 
his quaint but thrilling narratives of his early travels, 
labors, and difficulties. Unaccustomed to the free 
use of the pen, he kept all his records in his tena- 
cious memory, much strengthened by use, and nar- 
rated with uncommon precision as to names, dates, 



i 3 8 



Nation Builders 



and the order in which facts transpired. This he 
did leisurely and with perfect self-possession, but 
spiced the whole with such apt remarks and con- 
summate good humor that the attention of the com- 
pany never faltered. Never was I better entertained 
or more instructed with the conversation of a fellow 
sojourner in one week than with his. It was decid- 
edly rich." 

As a singer James Axley was peculiarly accept- 
able to people who had neither choirs nor organs 
and to whom a good leading voice was a great boon. 
On at least one occasion his voice gained him a 
much-desired night's lodging after one had been re- 
fused. The preacher had ridden a long distance, 
and near nightfall came to a house in which were 
two women, a mother and daughter, and their serv- 
ants. Beyond the plantation he must plunge again 
into the woods and spend the night under the trees 
if he failed to find a welcome at the house. He rode 
up and made known his request, which was no 
strange one in that part of the country at that day. 
The women, either misjudging Axley's exterior, 
which was rough and uncouth, or lacking the com- 
mon hospitality of their region, refused his request. 
He was allowed to rest himself for a little while 
and warm himself before the fire, for it was cold 
weather. As he stood there, thinking of the pros- 
pect before him and somewhat downcast in conse- 



Another Company of the Sowers 139 

quence, he began to sing one of the Methodist hymns 
that seemed to fit so naturally into all the experi- 
ences of life, and before he had finished his hostess 
ordered the servant to take the stranger's horse 
around to the barn and feed him well. 

A sermon which Axley preached in Baltimore in 
1820 was remembered and spoken of up to the time 
of the civil war; but the effort which was noted 
as the greatest triumph of his career was a sermon 
preached to peach-brandy distillers in East Tennes- 
see, from the text, "Alexander the coppersmith did 
me much evil: the Lord reward him according to 
his works" (2 Tim. 4. 14). It was a temperance 
discourse, and ran something as follows : 

"Paul was a traveling preacher and a bishop, I 
presume, or a presiding elder at least, for he trav- 
eled extensively and had much to do not only in 
organizing the societies but in sending preachers 
here, there, and all over. He would not build on 
another man's foundations, but formed new circuits 
where Christ was not named, so that from Jerusalem 
round about unto Illyricum he had fully preached the 
gospel of Christ. One new place that he visited was 
very wicked — Sabbath-breaking, dancing, drinking, 
quarreling, fighting, swearing, etc., abounded; but 
the word of the Lord took effect, there was a pow- 
erful stir among the people, and many were con- 
verted. Among the subjects of that work there was 



140 



Nation Builders 



a certain noted character named Alexander, a still- 
maker by trade; also one Hymenseus, who was his 
partner in that business. Paul formed a new society 
and appointed Brother Alexander class leader. 
There was a great change in the place: the people 
left off their drinking, fighting, swearing, horse rac- 
ing, and all their wicked practices. The stills were 
worked up into bells and stew kettles, and thus ap- 
plied to useful purposes. The settlement was orderly, 
the meetings were prosperous, and things went well 
with them for some time. But one year they had a 
pleasant spring; there was no late frost, and the 
peach crop hit exactly. I do suppose, my brethren, 
that such a crop of peaches was never known before. 
The old folks ate all they could eat, the children 
ate all they could eat, the pigs ate all they could 
eat, and the sisters preserved all they could preserve, 
and still the limbs were bending and breaking. One 
Sunday, when the brethren met for worship, they 
gathered round outside of the meetinghouse and got 
to talking about their worldly business — as you 
know people sometimes do, and it is a mighty bad 
practice — and one said to another, 'Brother, how's 
the peach crop with you this year ¥ 

" '0/ said he, T never saw the like ; they are rot- 
ting on the ground under the trees. I don't know 
what to do with them.' 

" 'How would it do to still them ? The peaches 



Another Company of the Sowers 141 

will go to waste, but the brandy will keep, and it is 
very good in certain cases if not used to excess/ 

" T should like to know/ asked a cute brother, 
'how you can make brandy without stills ?' 

" 'That's nothing/ replied one, 'for our class 
leader, Brother Alexander, is as good a stillmaker 
as can be, and Brother Hymenaeus is another, and 
rather than see the fruit wasted they, no doubt, 
would make us a few/ 

"The next thing heard on the subject was a ham- 
mering in the class leader's shop, and soon the stills 
in every brother's orchard were smoking and the 
liquid poison streaming. When one called on an- 
other the bottle was brought out with the remark, 
'I want you to taste my new peach brandy ; I think 
it is pretty good.' The guest, after tasting it once, 
was urged to repeat, when, smacking his lips, he 
would reply, 'Well, it's tolerable; but I wish you 
would come over and taste mine.' So they tasted 
and tasted, till many of them got about half drunk 
and I don't know but three quarters. Then the very 
devil was raised among them; the society was in 
an uproar, and Paul was sent for to come and try 
and settle the difficulty. At first it was difficult to 
find sober, disinterested ones enough to try the 
guilty ; but finally he got his committee formed, and 
the first one he brought to account was Alexander 
the coppersmith, who pleaded not guilty. He de- 



142 



Nation Builders 



clared that he had not tasted, bought, sold, or dis- 
tilled a drop of brandy. 'But/ said Paul, 'you made 
the stills, and if you hadn't made the stills there 
could have been no liquor made, and if no liquor 
no one could have been intoxicated/ So they ex- 
pelled him first and Hymenaeus next, and went on 
for complement, till the society was relieved of all 
stillmakers, distillers, dram sellers, and dram drink- 
ers, and peace was once more restored. Paul says : 
'Holding faith, and a good conscience; which some 
having put away concerning faith have made ship- 
wreck: of whom is Hymenaeus and Alexander; 
whom I have delivered unto Satan, that they may 
learn not to blaspheme/ Of course, they flew off 
the handle and joined the schismatics." 

To fully appreciate the force of the foregoing 
discourse it is necessary, of course, that one should 
put himself in the place of a peach-growing, still- 
making, brandy-selling community and try to read 
into the cold lines of type as presented here the 
splendid voice and vehement delivery of the ec- 
centric preacher. 

On one occasion it is told of him that, having 
preached upon the necessity of nonconformity to 
worldly fashions if people would be sincere Chris- 
tians, he affected to hold a dialogue with some imag- 
inary disputant in the audience, skillfully changing 
his voice as he took the alternate characters in the 



Another Company of the Sowers 143 

debate, and walked up and down the platform, upon 
which, behind him, several other preachers were 
seated. After appearing to demolish his opponent 
at every point in the argument the latter was 
made to say: "But, sir, some of your Methodist 
preachers themselves dress fashionably and play the 
dandy." 

"O no, my friend; that cannot be. Methodist 
ministers know better. They are men of more sense 
than that, and would not stoop so low as to disgrace 
themselves and the sacred office they hold by such 
gross inconsistency of character." 

"Well, sir, if you won't take my word for it just 
look at those young preachers on the platform be- 
hind you." 

Mr. Axley at this swung around, looked his 
shrinking colaborers over for a moment in seeming 
astonishment, and then said, in a dejected tone, fac- 
ing the audience again, "If you please we will drop 
that subject" 

William Henry Milburn, the blind preacher, has 
left a description of Peter Cartwright that is so 
graphic and at the same time so picturesque that we 
are tempted to quote it at length. It was during 
Milburn's boyhood, just after the removal of his 
parents from their Philadelphia home to the West, 
that he first saw the famous backwoods preacher. 
It was the first Sunday in an unfamiliar church, 



144 Nation Builders 



among strange people, a bright June day, but clouded 
to the stranger's eye by homesickness. 

"Our attention was arrested by a strange appari- 
tion striding up the aisle. All seemed whispering 
to their neighbors, 'There he goes/ and all eyes were 
riveted upon a man of medium height, thickset, with 
enormous bone and muscle, and although his iron- 
gray hair and wrinkled brow told of the advance of 
years his step was still vigorous and firm. His face 
was bronzed by exposure to the weather; he car- 
ried a white Quaker hat in his hand, and his upper 
garment was a furniture-calico dressing gown with- 
out wadding. The truant breeze seemed to seize 
this garment by its skirt, and, lifting it to a level 
with his armpits, disclosed to the gazing congrega- 
tion a full view of the copperas-colored pantaloons 
and shirt of the divine — for he was a divine, and one 
worth a day's journey to see and hear. 

"He had then been a backwoods preacher for 
nearly forty years, ranging the country from the 
Lakes to the Gulf and from the Alleghanies to the 
Mississippi. He was inured to every form of hard- 
ship and had looked calmly at peril of every kind— 
the tomahawk of the Indian, the spring of the pan- 
ther, the hug of the bear, the sweep of the tornado, 
the rush of swollen torrents, and the fearful chasm 
of the earthquake. He had lain in the canebrake 
and made his bed upon the snow of the prairie and 



Another Company of the Sowers 145 

on the oozy soil of the swamp, and had wandered, 
hunger-bitten, among the solitudes of the mountains. 
He had been in jeopardy among robbers and in dan- 
ger from desperadoes who had sworn to take his life. 
He had preached in the cabin of the slave and the 
mansion of the master, to the Indians and to the 
men of the border. He had taken his life in his 
hand and had ridden in the path of whizzing bullets, 
that he might proclaim peace. He had stood on the 
outskirts of civilization and welcomed the first 
comers to the woods and prairies. At the command 
of Him who said, 'Go into all the world/ he had 
roamed through the wilderness ; as a disciple of the 
man who said, 'The world is my parish/ his travels 
had equaled the limits of an empire. 

"Many a son of Anak has been leveled in the dust 
by his sledgelike fist, and when the blind fury of his 
assailants urged them headlong into personal con- 
flict with him his agility, strength, and resolution 
gave them cause for bitter repentance. Another 
Gideon, more than once has he led a handful of the 
faithful against the armies of the aliens who were 
desecrating the place of worship and threatening to 
abolish religious services, and put them to inglorious 
flight. But he only girded on his strength thus and 
used the weapons that nature gave him when neces- 
sity and the law of self-defense seemed to admit of 
no escape. To breathe the word of hope into the 



146 



Nation Builders 



ear of the dying and to minister solace to the sur- 
vivors, to take little children in his arms and bless 
them, to lead the flock over which God had made him 
overseer, and to warn the ungodly of the error of 
their ways, entreating them to be reconciled to God 
by the cross of Christ, was the business of his life. 
Learning he had none, but the keenest perception 
and the truest instincts enabled him to read human 
nature as men read a book ... a workman that 
needed not to be ashamed. 

"A voice which, in his prime, was capable of 
almost every modulation, the earnest force and 
homely directness of his speech, and his power over 
the passions of the human heart made him an orator 
to win and command the suffrages of a Western 
audience. And ever through the discourse came and 
went and came again a humor that was resistless, 
now broadening the features into a merry smile, and 
then softening the heart until tears stood in the eyes 
of all. His figures and illustrations were often 
grand, sometimes fantastical. Like all natives of 
a new country, he spoke in metaphors, and his were 
borrowed from the magnificent realm in which he 
lived. All forms of nature were familiar to him. 
. . . You might hear, in a single discourse, the thun- 
der tread of a frightened herd of buffaloes as they 
rushed wildly across the prairie, the crash of the 
windrow as it fell smitten by; the breath of the tern- 



Another Company of the Sowers 147 

pest, the piercing scream of the wildcat as it scared 
the midnight forest, the majestic rhythm of the Mis- 
sissippi as it harmonized the distant East and West 
and, united, bore their tributes to the far-off ocean, 
the silvery flow of a mountain rivulet, the whisper 
of groves, and the jocund laughter of unnumbered 
prairie flowers as they toyed in dalliance with the 
evening breeze. . . ..Another of the poet's attri- 
butes was his — the impulse and power to create 
his own language, and he was the best lexicon of 
Western words, phrases, and idioms that I have 
ever heard. 

"Such was the man that now stood before us in 
the desk, the famous presiding elder of Illinois — 
the renowned Peter Cartwright." 

The anecdotes of Cartwright's eccentric humor 
were almost numberless. They were as familiar at 
the firesides of an older generation of Methodists 
as the tales of the Cid were to the people of Spain in 
the olden times. Not Mr. Travers or David Crockett 
nor hardly even President Lincoln was the subject 
of more anecdotes than this much-beloved itinerant 
preacher. 

With great gusto an appreciative parishioner on 
the frontier would recount how Cartwright first 
licked and then converted the bully who attempted 
to bar his way to a preaching appointment. He was 
said to have been the original of the story told by 



148 



Nation Builders 



Edward Eggleston in The Circuit Rider, of the min- 
ister who worked a turbulent audience to a pitch of 
fury by his fearless denunciations of their wicked- 
ness, and then, just at the moment when they were 
making a rush toward him, extinguished the candles 
in the desk and made his exit unhurt. 

On one occasion, at a Conference presided over 
by a bishop whose physical infirmity made him a foe 
to mirth, the bubbling humor of Cartwright was 
regarded with marked disfavor. The superior officer 
called him sternly to account, and something like the 
following dialogue took place : 

"I read in my Bible, 'Be angry and sin not/ but 
I nowhere read, 'Laugh and sin not/ We will ask 
divine pardon for this levity. Brother Cartwright 
will lead in prayer." 

Cartwright led in repeating the Lord's Prayer, 
and then jumped to his feet to take up the cudgels : 
"Look here, Mr. Bishop, w r hen I dig potatoes I 
dig potatoes, when I hoe corn I hoe corn, when 
I pray I pray, and when I attend to business I want 
to attend to business. I wish you did, too, and I 
don't want you to take such a snap judgment on me 
again." 

"Brother, do you think you are growing in 

grace?" 

"Yes, bishop, I think I am— in spots." 

The bishop did not pursue the subject any further. 



Another Company of the Sowers 149 

Another anecdote of the Illinois preacher relates 
to his first visit to New York, where he put up at 
the Astor House and was given a room as near the 
roof as could be found. A sleepy night clerk, not 
greatly prepossessed with the appearance of the 
backwoodsman, whom he took for a regular hayseed, 
was not a little bothered when the bell began to ring 
from the distant apartment, and the servant who 
had conducted the guest to his eyrie commenced a 
series of journeys up the interminable stairs. It was 
ages before the day of elevators, and the waiter was 
getting tired. He reported that the guest was crazy. 
"The first time he called me up to ask how we were 
all getting on down here," he told the clerk. "And 
the next time he was bothered by the bell on the 
City Hall and wanted to know where the fire was, 
and the last time he asked for an ax." 

"An ax?" 

"Yes, sir, an ax." 

"What in creation does he want with an ax." 
"I don't know, sir. He insisted that he must have 
one." 

Then the clerk climbed to the distant room and 
asked somewhat impatiently what an ax was wanted 
for. 

"Well," said the guest, "in my state when a man 
has a distance to go in a strange country he blazes 
his way with an ax, so that he may know how to get 



Nation Builders 



back. I want to leave my room, and I want to blaze 
my way so that I can find it again." 

"Who are you, anyway?" gasped the astonished 
clerk. 

"My name is Peter Cartwright," answered the 
old man, amiably. 

Apologies were instantly forthcoming; the clerk 
did not know, had not been able to read the name 
on the register, etc. Certainly he had reserved a 
room on the second floor, the very best in the house, 
for the distinguished guest, and the satisfied preacher 
descended to more agreeable quarters. 

"How is it," once asked a New Englander of an- 
other church, "that your denomination has no Doc- 
tors of Divinity ?" 

Peter's answer was instant: "Our divinity has 
never been sick, and, consequently, doesn't need 
doctoring." 

Now, when Cartwright was in company with 
General Jackson (for he once preached on a circuit 
that included the Hermitage) he abated nothing of 
his sturdy independence of speech and character, and 
the Democratic leader admired him greatly. One 
of their first encounters was upon an occasion when 
Cartwright was preaching and the general entered 
the meetinghouse. Some one whispered, "Brother 
Cartwright, you must be careful how you preach 
to-night; General Jackson has just come in." 



Another Company of the Sowers 151 

In an instant the preacher's uncompromising an- 
swer was heard in every corner of the building: 
"What do you suppose I care for General Jackson? 
If he don't repent of his sins and ask pardon and 
believe on the Lord Jesus Christ he will be damned 
as quick as any other sinner." 

Jackson met him the next morning, shook hands 
cordially, and said: "Sir, you are a preacher after 
my own heart. If I had a regiment of such men as 
you I'd conquer the earth." 

A flippant youth, a guest at General Jackson's 
table, thought that it would be noble sport to bait the 
preacher, who was also present. "Mr. Cartwright," 
he began, "do you really believe in hell ? Of course 
you preach about it, but I want your private opin- 
ion. Can any intelligent man believe any nonsense 
of that sort?" 

Before the preacher had time to answer the gen- 
eral had taken up the cudgels for him : "Mr. Jones, 
I believe in hell !" 

"You, General Jackson?" stammered the confused 
guest. "Why, what possible use can there be for 
such a place?" 

"To put infernal fools like you in, sir," vociferated 
the general, whose practice was not at that time quite 
on a par with his theology, but who did not propose 
to countenance any disrespect to religion at his 
board. 



152 



Nation Builders 



Cartwright was not a stickler for social observ- 
ances, but he did demand and insist upon deference 
to religious forms and a certain respect to the min- 
isters of the gospel. He more than once refused to 
eat at a table where he was not permitted to first 
ask a blessing on the food. Though hungry and 
weary after a long journey, he would shake the dust 
from his feet and prolong his fast indefinitely rather 
than give way in such a matter. 

One of the most characteristic stories told of Cart- 
wright (on his own authority) is that once when 
in the mountains he was the means of turning a 
dance into a prayer meeting. The people were good- 
natured pioneers, not used to ministers and their 
ways, but ready to give the stranger their best and 
a welcome. After the dance commenced the belle 
of the occasion, thinking it a pity that so stalwart a 
young man should be left to sit out the festivities 
alone, and no doubt attributing his inactivity to 
bashfulness, held out her hand to him, and invited 
him to dance with her. On the spur of the moment 
Cartwright rose, took the girl's hand, and led her 
into the middle of the room ; then, to the astonish- 
ment of all, he announced that he never did anything 
without asking God's blessing upon it, and pro- 
ceeded to kneel and pray, still holding the hand of 
his somewhat frightened partner. He prayed with 
"great liberty," as the old-fashioned Methodist 



Another Company of the Sowers 153 

phrase was, and in a little while he had a revival in 
full swing. 

Cartwright went to Boston in later life for a visit, 
and the crowds who flocked to hear him were disap- 
pointed. They had heard much about the wild elo- 
quence of this backwoodsman, and failed to find it. 
The fact seems to be that Cartwright was trying his 
best to adapt himself to the cultivated people of the 
Hub, and, as a consequence, they did not hear the 
real Cartwright at all at first. But after the second 
or third sermon he abandoned the attempt to be 
anything other than his natural self, and the 
result was that the favor of his hearers increased 
mightily. 

One of the men of Cartwright's generation, accus- 
tomed to the sights and sounds and signs of the 
woods and the waters, used to note of bird and cry 
of beast, well versed in woodlore and cabin customs, 
heard the music of a piano for the first time with 
rapture. At last his musical soul was satisfied with 
something approaching the heavenly strains he had 
dreamed of, but there was nothing in his experience 
with which to compare it except — could imagination 
build upon a slighter foundation? — sheep bells! 
"Did anyone ever hear such a set of sheep bells?" 
he cried. 

A pendant to the above is an incident narrated of 
another preacher who knocked loudly on a door 



154 



Nation Builders 



beside which was a silver-plated bell handle, of the 
use of which he had not the slightest idea. 

Mr. Milburn tells how he went into the work of 
the ministry with a very small musical equipment. 
He had three tunes, learned with great pains : a long 
meter, short meter, and common meter, that should 
have fitted any ordinary occasion. But he records 
with considerable naivete that he frequently met with 
disaster by trying to fit long-meter words to his 
common-meter tune. One of the preachers, with a 
capacity for music about equal to Milburn's— that 
is to say, far below the average— used to ask if some 
brother would "raise" the tune, averring that he 
could "tote" it afterward. But the plan did not 
always work well. 

We once asked a preacher who was familiar with 
frontier work what he considered the most necessary 
accomplishment for the Methodist itinerant, and he 
promptly replied : "The ability to sing. Music, next 
to the Bible, is the thing to be relied upon. If not 
one of the questions formally asked when a candi- 
date comes up before Conference, it is at least put 
to him in some form : 'Can you sing?' The ability to 
sing means the ability to gather a congregation 
almost anywhere. I find it of the utmost impor- 
tance, and since I learned to strum a few chords on a 
guitar I can always get a crowd to listen to> me in an 
Indian village, a logging camp, or a mining town." 



Another Company of the Sowers 155 

Nearly all of the older preachers could at least 
"raise the tune/' Many could "tote it" with con- 
siderable power and energy, if not with the finished 
grace of a De Reszke, and not a few were famous 
for the possession of rich, flexible, sweet voices 
which, like their hearts, were "tuned to praise." 

Another man of Cartwright's day, an abler man 
as a theologian, though not readier in defense of the 
things he was persuaded were true, was Elder Peter 
Ackers. He was so rapt in his subject that he fre- 
quently forgot time and place, and is said to have 
preached on occasions sermons four or five hours 
long. To the praise of his earnestness be it said that 
his audience would not have had the discourse a 
minute shorter. Perhaps something should be said 
to the praise of the audience, too, for it took certain 
sturdiness of physique as well as spiritual hunger 
to stand such an outpouring of eloquence. 

Henry Biddleman Bascom was born in May, 
1796, and died at Louisville, Kentucky, on Septem- 
ber 8, 1850. He was elected a bishop of the Meth- 
odist Episcopal Church, South, in May, 1850, hav- 
ing for eight years previously been president of 
the Transylvania University. By a comparison of 
dates it will be seen that when his work was 
finished he was not an old man, yet he was one of 
those who served to connect the earlier and later 
periods of Methodist history in America. At the 



156 



Nation Builders 



time of the great revival which distinguished the 
opening years of the nineteenth century he was but 
a child, yet he was an important factor in the work 
of building and developing the superstructure placed 
upon the foundations he helped to lay. 

A gentleman whose recollections go back to the 
early middle period of Methodist history told how 
Bascom took the people of New York by storm. 
In the old Greene Street Church he drew such 
crowds that people climbed up to the windows and 
stood outside the doors in breathless attention, while 
the congregation within were swayed by his words 
as ripe grain is moved by the wind that passes over 
it. Men sat with mouths agape, or with tears run- 
ning over their cheeks, utterly oblivious of their 
surroundings, intent only upon the persuasive, elo- 
quent, mastering voice and keen eyes and vehement 
gestures of the greatest of American pulpit orators. 

Those who tell of his preaching recollect always 
the effect and forget the sermon. They relate their 
impressions as one would describe a picture. There 
was the tall, spare, eagle-eyed, magnetic man on his 
feet ; the graceful swing and sweep of his arms ; the 
fierce, passionate denunciation, and the musical, con- 
vincing sweetness of his voice. There were the rows 
upon rows of crowded humanity in the pews, the 
packed aisles, the faces of self-forgetful, entranced 
listeners convulsed with emotion. But the words? 



Another Company of the Sowers 157 

They were not reported. Like the tones of sweet 
singers and the skill of bygone players upon instru- 
ments, the music of that voice and the skill of that 
performer upon the human heart must remain for- 
ever a matter of tradition. The few bits and snatches 
that are attributed to him are denuded and cold. 



CHAPTER VIII 

A Recollection of Bascom 

[This narrative of a Sabbath morning's journey 
to see and hear Henry Bascom, and the following 
estimate of the great orator's relation to the reli- 
gious life of the people of his generation, are a per- 
sonal note, written by the late Andrew C. Wheeler. 
His associate in the authorship of this book has not 
abridged nor in any way changed this most graphic 
and valuable record :] 

A Dream of Childhood's Dream 

One of the earliest and deepest of impressions was 
made upon my child mind when I was about six 
years old. It was in Indiana, where my father had 
then been living for several years. He set out early 
one Sabbath morning in summer with my mother 
and myself in a buggy to go fifteen miles to church. 
This in itself was an extraordinary proceeding even 
to me, for we had our own church convenient, and 
my father, as I well knew, being a rigid member of 
it, was opposed in principle to what was then called 
"buggy riding" on Sunday. A journey of fifteen 
miles at that time in a wild country was a much more 



A Recollection of Bascom 159 

arduous undertaking than we can conceive of at this 
day. The roads were uncertain and frequently im- 
passable. They led through primeval forests and 
across treacherous fords and skirted uncertain 
sloughs, and they were beset with other perils of man 
and beast in a wilderness. But to the quickened sen- 
sibilities of the child the journey wore the ineradi- 
cable delight of a new experience. It was the first 
time that I had seen the external world lit with the 
benison of sunrise, and to me the majesty of nature 
in all her unkempt glory wore the sparkle and sang 
the song of a new existence. 

We must have toiled laboriously over that pri- 
meval track, beset with difficulties and obstructions 
of which I took no heed. I was sensible of an eager- 
ness and a zest in the undertaking that invested it 
with some kind of inscrutable interest, but mainly 
I exulted in the glory of the way. The precious 
alchemy of a child mind transmuted those rude ele- 
ments into the sharp ecstasy of surprises. The 
musky scents of the forest were strangely acute 
and delightful, and the morning tumult of the 
birds choired us on our journey with ineffable 
joyousness. 

As we neared the end of our journey we encoun- 
tered at the crossroads other mire-bespattered vehi- 
cles, evidently upon the same errand as ourselves. 
From the salutations that passed I understood only 



i6o Nation Builders 

that some common purpose was animating our little 
community, and that not only our neighbors but the 
inhabitants of other and to me unknown communi- 
ties were converging upon some central destination 
with eagerness and with determination. As this 
consciousness of some important and common pur- 
pose lying at the end of our journey gradually 
displaced the child's enjoyment of the senses I 
must have made inquiries of my mother, for she 
informed me, with a solemnity that was meant to 
be comprehensive, that we were going "to hear 
Bascom." 

I repeated it over in my mind with a mimetic echo 
of her seriousness : "We are going to hear Bascom." 
To go and hear Bascom was then one of the most 
important events in one's life. All that I knew of 
life was hurrying forward to the accomplishment of 
that great feat. To go and hear him was at least for 
me to pass through a strangely beautiful and exult- 
ant experience. 

Presently we approached a village, and as we did 
so the broader roadway became choked with vehicles 
of all kinds carrying heavy freights of human be- 
ings, some of them devout and sensible of the weight 
of the occasion, others vociferous and reckless— as 
if to hear Bascom were as much of an event as 
going to the circus. Finally we came to a green area 
with the old-fashioned white "meetinghouse 3 ' in the 



A Recollection of Bascom 161 

center, and then we were swallowed up in a great 
multitude. 

All the particulars of that unusual spectacle were 
deeply impressed upon my plastic mind. The vast 
concourse of people, crowding up at the church 
entrance, the great circles of wagons, and some- 
where the faint, protesting clang of a distant bell, 
sharp and melodious to my ear, that must have 
been urgently reminding many of these people that 
their own church should not be neglected to hear 
Bascom. 

I remember the exclamation of disappointment 
made by my father when, standing up in the buggy, 
he saw that he had arrived too late to get into the 
church. I recall as from a dream an effort of his 
to find the home of an acquaintance, where my 
mother could rest before starting back, and how 
when it was found it was deserted — everybody had 
gone to hear Bascom. Then it was that in wan- 
dering back to the central point of attraction, and 
working his way up to one of the open church win- 
dows he lifted me up in his arms to look in. It 
was that momentary glimpse, caught by a child's 
sensitive eye and photographed forever on his brain, 
that I now try to reproduce. I saw a dense and 
eager assemblage held spellbound by a majestic 
figure in the pulpit, that to me wore an almost super- 
natural air of authority and grandeur. In that 



1 62 



Nation Builders 



transient glimpse were all the ingredients of an after 
speculation and wonder. The wet faces, the strained 
and still attention— broken only by the meas- 
ured cadences of one voice — the contrast of the 
homespun assemblage with the inspired air of the 
speaker, and, above all, the strange words that my 
ear caught and retained without knowing their 
meaning — -"that ye might have life and have it 
more abundantly" — all these things in one flash, as 
it were, made a revelation of power wholly inex- 
plicable that got hold of my imagination. In the 
Bible stories that my mother told me afterward, of 
the prophets and warriors, my infantile fancy filled 
in the descriptive outlines with that majestic figure, 
as I had seen it with arm uplifted and head erect, 
uttering mysterious words at which men were ap- 
palled. David, Moses, Elisha, and Saint Paul for 
a long time afterward took on the dimensions and 
authority of that form and face thus shot in an 
instant across the vision of a child. 

That was the only glimpse I ever caught of 
Henry B. Bascom, the great preacher. But after- 
ward my mother told me that my father had held 
me up to that church window so that I could say 
in after life that I had seen the greatest preacher in 
the world. In her dear old scale of values that was 
an inestimable privilege. And now, after all these 
years, I am trying to make good her words, and if 



A Recollection of Bascom 163 



I go a little beyond them and try to see the great 
preacher as others saw him it is the best one can do 
who had the misfortune to be born a few years too 
late to enter fully into the popular enthusiasm that 
attended his career. 



CHAPTER IX 



The Songs of Zion 

We have spoken of the ability to sing as part of 
the Methodist preacher's equipment. It would 
hardly be possible to overestimate the power of 
music in drawing and holding audiences of the 
plain people, to use Mr. Lincoln's descriptive 
phrase for the large majority of his fellow coun- 
trymen. 

Nowadays great organs, responding to the touch 
of skillful players, trained choirs and star singers 
that make a profession of "tuneful words of praise," 
take the place in many Methodist churches of the 
simple, sincere, swelling outburst of congregational 
song. The times have changed, and the preacher no 
longer is obliged to be chorister and precentor. But 
in the earlier days he sang almost as many souls to 
everlasting bliss as he preached into the ways of 
righteousness. 

In the woods, across some forlorn clearing, 
through the rich river bottoms, and on the mountain 
side the clarion notes of sacred song sounded like 
the bugle that announces the advance of a squadron. 
The woodsman, the Indian, the river boatman drew 



The Songs of Zion 



165 



near to hear who this vociferous entertainer was 
and what his outburst signified. 

In a country where one old fiddle to a dozen clear- 
ings was a liberal allowance in the matter of musical 
entertainment and new songs were as scarce as new 
dollars, where the people, physically strong and 
active, were mentally starved, the coming of a man 
whose repertoire contained a dozen or twenty of 
Charles Wesley's hymns meant more than an opera 
company that should promise everything from 
Tannhauser to Carmen would mean to us. 

We, who are satiated with entertainment, can 
scarcely realize what that one voice uplifted in song- 
meant to the frontiersman. If you have seen a band 
in the streets of a small country town you have 
something of the impression produced. That was 
the first important function of the spiritual songs 
— they drew the people together. 

Then they made the worship general when other- 
wise it would have been individual. The first req- 
uisite of a good song is that it shall flow from the 
lips without effort — "words that sing themselves," 
we are wont to talk about. When the preacher led 
the whole congregation joined in, learned the words, 
caught the tune in a jiffy, and immediately became 
participators in the service of praise or supplication. 
The value of such gentle craft as that, well under- 
stood as it used to be, is almost forgotten and often 



Nation Builders 



entirely disregarded now. Wherever you can get 
a whole congregation heartly singing songs that are 
not too difficult, and not too inane, you may be sure 
that they are in a frame of mind to make the most 
of the sermon. 

What melodies they were, those songs of Zion, 
in which Wesley had crystallized the longing and 
the hope, the penitence and the aspiration of the 
human race! Hardly more admirable, perhaps, 
from a musical standpoint, than the later produc- 
tions that are commonly associated with Mr. San- 
key's name, they had a lilt and a swing to them 
that aroused the sluggish nature and awakened the 
spiritual longing of many a rough pioneer. 

With what unction the voice in the wilderness 
was lifted up in words whose admonition and en- 
couragement were understood to be part of a divine 
commission ! 

"Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim, 
And publish abroad his wonderful name; 
The name all- victorious of Jesus extol; 
His kingdom is glorious, and rules over all." 

What an urgent, triumphant major strain ! Fear 
and doubt and creeping compromise had nothing to 
do with it. As it rang out under green leaf canopies 
and between aisles of oak and pine it must have at- 
tracted all that was highest and best in those that 
heard it and repelled whatever was base and cow- 



The Songs of Zion 



ardly. There was a no-compromise quality about 
Wesley's songs that made them apt auxiliaries to 
men who preached without reservation that all sin- 
ners must be damned except by the grace of God 
they repent and believe in the Lord Christ. 

There was a great old hymn, a favorite in the 
settlements, that we can hardly see the beauty of 
till we have put ourselves in the circumstances and 
amid the surroundings of those who lived on the 
ragged edge of the world: 

* 4 Come on, my partners in distress, 
My comrades through the wilderness." 

And the short-meter hymn called "Peace" seemed 
to take a strong hold on the minds of people whose 
suffering and distress were very frequent and very 
real : 

4 ' Thou very-present Aid 

In suffering and distress, 
The mind which still on thee is stayed, 
Is kept in perfect peace." 

But chief among all the songs that roused the 
spirits and taxed the lungs of the oldest believer and 
the newest convert, that one which satisfied the de- 
sire for expression of hearts overburdened with love 
and longing, that was sung to all the accompani- 
ments of amens and tears and the various expres- 
sions of rapture that an honest but unsophisticated 
being may give way to, was : 



Nation Builders 



"O for a thousand tongues, to sing 
My great Redeemer's praise; 
The glories of my God and King, 
The triumphs of his grace ! ' ' 

It was a great hymn for sacramental seasons, when 
those who spread the Lord's table in the wilderness 
looked with lively faith for a pentecostal outpouring 
of the Spirit. 

Then there was one that was suited to sterner 
occasions, that had a dreadfully Calvinistic founda- 
tion to it despite its Methodist re-creation. Isaac 
Watts wrote the core of it, and Charles Wesley 
rewrote or varied it. It is this : 

* 4 Before Jehovah's awful throne, 
Ye nations bow with sacred joy; 
Know that the Lord is God alone, 
He can create, and he destroy." 

Well do we remember the effect of the music to 
which these words were sung as we heard them for 
the first time. It had a distinctly martial and clan- 
gorous quality, as though an orchestra of brass 
should have accompanied it. 

In marked antithesis the very expression of happy 
surrender was the hymn commencing: 

* ' Jesus, thou art my righteousness, 
For all my sins were thine; 
Thy death hath bought of God my place, 
Thy life hath made him mine." 

It was something to be sung at the close of the 



The Songs of Zion 169 



day, before candle lighting, or when the logs were 
crackling on the hearth— a hymn for family worship 
and the quiet hour. 

The final and lasting advantage of the itinerant's 
equipment of the songs of Zion was that when the 
preacher went away the songs did not. Every one 
of those old sacred ditties preached its sermons over 
and over to the man who could perhaps get the 
preacher's words out of his mind, but could not 
manage to forget the words of song that were in- 
dissolubly wrapped up with the tunes that he and 
all his kin and neighbors hummed and whistled 
as they went about their work. They were not only 
pertinacious, but they seemed to fit every occasion 
of joy or sorrow. Instead of coon songs and rag- 
time inanities, the man of the Kentucky or Ohio or 
Indiana frontier had for his popular songs the songs 
of Zion. 



CHAPTER X 
From Small Beginnings 

For many years those who were ignorant of the 
real activities of the Methodist Church, as well as 
its active foes, persistently circulated grave mis- 
statements about its attitude toward education. 

As all men know, the work of preaching the gos- 
pel was of necessity often committed into the hands 
of preachers who knew more about the plan of sal- 
vation than they did about the construction of Eng- 
lish grammar. The story of the exhorter who got 
hopelessly involved in the mazes of a sentence that 
refused to end properly, and who finally gave it up 
and shouted, "My brethren, my verb and nomina- 
tive have failed to connect, but I'm bound for the 
kingdom of heaven," may be apocryphal, but it is 
not beyond the bounds of possibility. The men who 
won the wilderness were frequently unlearned; 
their value to the world lay in the fact that they were 
never content to remain so. 

The wisest thinkers and investigators in the 
world have a habit of regarding the scholarship of 
all time as relative ignorance, the standard being the 
unattained heights of perfect knowledge. Those 



From Small Beginnings 



171 



who have just sufficient learning to make them vain 
and censorious are less enviable than the unlearned 
man who strives after more knowledge. 

The term "ignorant fanatic" was frequently ap- 
plied to men who daily risked their lives to impart 
their little store of knowledge to those less favored 
than themselves, and who at the same time were 
using every effort to increase that store. 

It is true that the first generation of Methodist 
preachers were not, for the most part, men of in- 
tellectual culture. They were probably not greatly 
superior in that respect to the immediate circle of 
our Lord's disciples. Let us admit without argu- 
ment that Dr. Coke and Bishop Asbury could not 
find a sufficient number of men possessing a high 
degree of education to carry the gospel message, 
like a torch, into the wilderness, to fire the con- 
sciences of a great and scattered congregation. 
Frankly accepting the statement that the pioneers 
of Methodism, except in rare instances, had seldom 
even seen the inside of a college, we ask, What of 
it? Those men, had they been furnished with ex- 
haustless stores of Greek and Hebrew, of philoso- 
phy, science, or belles-lettres, would have found 
absolutely no use for such wares among the frontier 
cabins of a primitive people. They carried a full 
stock of convictions, a plentiful supply of the most 
refreshing and invigorating moral truths that ever 



172 



Nation Builders 



revived the perishing souls of men, and they found 
for this merchandise an astonishing market. 

It appears that the itinerant preachers met the 
prevailing condition of ignorance with a persistent 
effort to dispel it, and they fitly commenced this 
Herculean labor with elementary methods. They 
carried a few simple books or tracts, compiled with 
a direct purpose of moral instruction ; simple stories, 
not above the comprehension of simple readers, but 
often composed with a degree of literary skill that 
has not been generally appreciated by literary critics. 
Many of these tracts were written by Wesley or his 
immediate coadjutors, who did a great work at the 
beginning of the Methodist movement in England 
by means of such popular literature. We are re- 
minded in this connection of the popular tales of 
Maria Edgeworth, which had in their day a great 
vogue. Born in Oxfordshire in 1767, Miss Edge- 
worth evidently came under the Wesleyan influence, 
and the stories wherewith she sought to "point a 
moral and adorn a tale" were in line with many 
less famous Methodist tracts. 

In the same category may be classed those aston- 
ishing short tales that broadened and perpetuated 
the fame of Hannah More. Encouraged by the 
Rev. John Newton and others, the already widely 
popular authoress commenced a series of short 
stories that were particularly designed to undersell 



From Small Beginnings 



J 73 



and supplant the ocean of cheap trash, largely of 
French inspiration, with which the English market 
was flooded. The prosecution of this great labor, 
which was commenced about the year 1793, almost 
exhausted the vitality of the brave and gifted 
woman, and obliged her to call to her assistance 
several of her friends. The first series of tracts, 
known as the Cheap Repository Tracts, had during 
the first year the enormous sale of two million cop- 
ies, and are said to have had an incalculable influ- 
ence upon the poorer classes in England and Amer- 
ica. Their literary merit was so great that they 
overran the field for which they were intended and 
invaded the parlors and libraries of the more fas- 
tidious reading public. Such masterpieces as the 
Shepherd of Salisbury Plain and Parley the Porter, 
with perhaps half a score others, may be counted 
as permanent contributions to literature. 

If the question is asked, What have Hannah 
More's tracts to do with Methodism more than with 
any other Christian sect? the answer is that the 
revival of evangelical Christianity in England at 
the day that they were written was Methodist. The 
Christian renaissance of the eighteenth century 
commenced at Oxford in the Pious Club, and John 
Wesley was its apostle. On this point Miss More 
herself gives certain testimony in a letter written 
to the Rev. John Newton in 1794: "My great and 



i/4 



Nation Builders 



worldly friends are terribly afraid I shall be too 
Methodistical— a term now applied to all vital Chris- 
tianity— and watch me so closely that it will require 
more prudence than some of my religious friends 
would think it right to employ/' 

It has been claimed, and I believe without refu- 
tation, that the series of tracts that bear Hannah 
More's name were an important factor in the estab- 
lishment of the Religious Tract Society, formed 
in London in 1799. The parent tract society of all 
was formed by John Wesley and Thomas Coke in 
1782, and its publications were largely dependent 
upon the personal labors of Wesley, who wrote 
many books and abridged and edited others for the 
moral culture of the people. 

No greater fallacy has ever been circulated than 
that which has undervalued the moral tract of a 
century ago. The names of Edgeworth, More, 
and Wesley might be supplemented by many others 
of commanding rank in the world of letters, and 
the result of their most earnest work should afford a 
subject for serious investigation to the student of 
literary history. 

The inception of Methodism was one of instruc- 
tion. Whitefield, whose magnificent campaign for 
Christ resulted in the establishment in America of 
more institutions of learning than have ever been 
credited to the initiative of any other one man, was 



From Small Beginnings 



175 



a Methodist in every essential, drawing his inspira- 
tion in company with Wesley from the same font, 
and keeping his Calvinism rigidly in the background 
in all his American work. The establishment of a 
number of free schools for the poor in England was 
directly due to Wesley, and his influence upon the 
public school system of America is immeasurable. 

We are wont to reverence Robert Raikes as the 
father of Sunday schools in the world, but the Rev. 
Warren A. Chandler in his recent book on Great 
Revivals and the Great Republic has pointed out 
that "the Sunday school movement, inaugurated by 
Robert Raikes, was suggested to him by a Methodist 
woman, Sophia Cook, who marched with him at 
the head of his troop of ragged children the first 
Sunday they were taken to the parish church. An- 
other Methodist woman, Hannah Ball, really had at 
High Wycombe a Sunday school fourteen years in 
advance of Raikes's first school in Gloucester, and 
Wesley, in his parish of Christ Church, Savannah, 
Georgia, had a Sunday school fifty years before the 
work of Raikes began. Francis Asbury organized 
a Sunday school in Hanover County, Virginia, in 
1786." 

We cannot estimate the value of such a distribu- 
tion of tracts as that which we have been consid- 
ering unless we can imagine a community almost 
destitute of books or newspapers, to whom every 



176 



Nation Builders 



scrap of printed matter was a precious boon, to be 
read and reread, loaned and treasured as long as 
it held together. Not infrequently an American 
frontier cabin was without a scrap of a printed page 
of any sort; sometimes an almanac, brown with 
smoke, dust-bespecked and thumb-marked, hung for 
years in a chimney corner, the sole literary treasure 
of a family. 

At a day that already belongs to the historic past 
of the nation the boy Lincoln found a neighbor 
with a little store of books that was a greater affair 
for that time and place than the Astor Library was 
in New York. His biographers tell how he bor- 
rowed the volumes and mastered them, reveling in 
the prospect they opened to him of a life beyond 
his familiar horizon of timber and farm land, of 
rail-splitting and flat-boating. Lincoln's experience 
with the books was an unusual one. The great 
majority of American frontier families never owned 
a book and rarely saw one till the Methodist 
preachers brought them. 

The traveling preachers were distributers of a 
wholesome literature of a type admirably suited to 
the mental capacity of those who received it and 
tending to perpetuate the impression made upon the 
minds and consciences of men by the spoken word. 
With the tracts were often carried hymn books, 
which were in great demand. 



From Small Beginnings 



177 



These distributions of reading matter were not 
free, except in cases where the people were abso- 
lutely destitute of the means to purchase. Probably 
they were not often paid for in money, which was a 
commodity almost as rare as literature ; but lodging, 
horse gear, provisions, or some other equivalent was 
readily accepted in exchange. The store of hooks 
with which a "saddlebag preacher" set out was 
always contributory to his support and sometimes 
his only available asset. 

There is no fairness in making a comparison be- 
tween the newly commissioned member of Asbury's 
field force and a college-bred New England divine, 
so far as relative advancement in book knowledge is 
concerned. Rather measure each man in the field 
where he worked, and by the value, the breadth, 
and the permanent results of the work performed. 

Not only did the field force of the Methodist 
Church act as distributers of the sort of literature 
best adapted to the comprehension and the needs of 
the scattered inland population of the new country ; 
but at the same time the whole church, through its 
governing bodies, was using every means to increase 
the efficiency of its preachers and enlarge the capac- 
ity of its membership by establishing schools and 
publication offices. 

As previously stated, Dr. Coke's work, com- 
menced at the very outset of Methodist labor in 



1 7 8 



Nation Builders 



America, was largely educational. Such facilities 
as the Methodist Church could control were offered 
to those who were persuaded that they had a call 
to preach, and with each generation these facilities 
increased, till at length the denomination that was 
poorest in material wealth and richest in the yearly 
interest of conversions to Christ became the most 
important and powerful of Christian sects in Amer- 
ica, and depends to-day for the bulk of its work 
upon an educated ministry. 

This high ground, to be sure, was not reached 
at a step. There were many years — intermediate 
years between the generation of the founders of 
Methodism and our modern era — when the feelings 
and prejudices of a very large proportion of Meth- 
odist laymen and not a few of its leaders were en- 
gaged in opposition to a ministry specially edu- 
cated for their work. The theory that the inspira- 
tion of the Spirit of God would be in all cases su- 
perior to a formal course of theological study was 
based upon certain Scripture texts and perhaps was 
fostered by the very genius of the Methodist Church. 
At the outset its teachings were not doctrinal; its 
appeals were always experiential. It was rather 
an evangelical society than a church built upon a 
theological foundation. The experience came first, 
and around this kernel grew the necessary shell of 
protective theology. It was hard for an old-line. 



From Small Beginnings 179 



Methodist to understand why any man who could 
read the Bible and hope for the inspiration of the 
Spirit to interpret it should require educational 
preparation for his work. The ministry were natu- 
rally the first to appreciate the need for such 
training. 

In 1833 Dickinson College, at Carlisle, Pennsyl- 
vania, passed into Methodist control, though orig- 
inally Presbyterian. It is worthy of note that the 
revivifying of this almost dead institution by the 
infusion of Methodist blood occurred during the 
very period when the reaction noticed in this chap- 
ter was at its height. It was a protest, by the best 
and most progressive spirits in the Methodist 
Church, against that reaction. 

Associated with the history of Dickinson are the 
imperishable names of McClintock and Crooks and 
many others who have honored the profession to 
which they gave their lives. It is especially gratify- 
ing to the surviving author of this book to pay here 
a tribute of loving remembrance and reverent admi- 
ration to the memory of George Richard Crooks, 
whose maturity may be said to have begun at Dick- 
inson College, where he graduated in 1840, and 
whose life of broad usefulness w r as withdrawn from 
the sight of men at Drew half a century later. 

It is not possible in a limited space to add to or 
improve upon Dr. William R Anderson's admirable 



i8o 



Nation Builders 



monograph upon Dr. Crooks. It is a pamphlet that 
should be read by everyone who would comprehend 
an important phase of Methodist history. One 
quotation may be permitted here: 

"The Philadelphia Conference never did itself 
greater honor nor served the church more truly 
than when it sent Dr. Crooks as one of its delegates 
to the General Conference in 1856. He was a mem- 
ber of the Committee on Education, and through his 
instrumentality an action was secured that was most 
vital to the interest of the church. . . . The friends 
of the higher ministerial qualifications were rallied ; 
public meetings were held; able advocates of the 
movement were enlisted. Dr. Crooks was its ardent 
and successful leader. With the cooperation of Dr. 
Edward Thomson, Dr. John Dempster, and others 
he secured the adoption of a resolution sanc- 
tioning the establishment of theological semina- 
ries in our church. Thus the sentiment was turned 
which with the advance of the years has crystallized 
in a well-nigh universal demand for an educated 
ministry. ... In 1866, as a member of the special 
Centennial Committee on Education, he originated 
a plan to establish a permanent fund for the educa- 
tion of the youth of Methodism, which fund should 
receive the offerings of the children of the church 
and be repeated in all coming years. His associates 
on the committee were John McClintock, Daniel 



From Small Beginnings 181 

Curry, Oliver Hoyt, James Bishop, and C. C. North. 
The outcome was Children's Day." 

Drew Theological Seminary did not come into 
existence till 1866, and from the outset its aim was 
to afford the broadest intellectual culture as well as 
a thorough training for the work of the ministry. 
It belongs to the immediate past and present, and 
has only an incidental connection with the subjects 
of this work. 

It is not enough to say that Methodism has done 
much for the cause of education in the United 
States. Let the old stigma, implied in faint praise 
when not more viciously or ignorantly affirmed, be 
forever removed. The Methodist Church has done 
her full share in establishing and supporting edu- 
cational institutions, has built and conducted schools 
and colleges, besides upholding with all her giant 
strength the public school system of America. Her 
full share has been a mighty proportion of the work 
accomplished in this continent, a proportion far 
greater than that of any other one denomination, 
because she is the strongest of all denominations 
in America to-day. 

Eighteen per cent of all the colleges and univer- 
sities reporting to the United States Commissioner 
of Education are under Methodist control, and 
twelve per cent of all the denominational schools in 
the country are Methodist establishments, though 



Nation Builders 



the support of the church has always been given 
by preference to public rather than to parochial 
schools. 

From Cokesbury College, in Maryland, instituted 
in 1785, the corner stone being laid by Bishop As- 
bury, to Drew, the lines both of effort and accom- 
plishment steadily widened. In the West for many 
years the only educational influence was that fostered 
by the Methodist Church. McKendree College, in 
Illinois, was the first college in the rich country 
that is now the teeming middle land of the republic. 

Taking the possible adult population of the 
United States as sixty millions — though that figure 
is probably somewhat in excess of the reality— we 
are brought face to face with the astounding reflec- 
tion that more than one tenth of that number are 
actually Methodist communicants. No comment 
can add to the impressiveness of that fact. 

Following the great Methodist Book Concern in 
New York, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Nashville, Ten- 
nessee, have each a similar publishing house. From 
these fountains have gone out a broad and ever- 
increasing stream of wholesome literature, and no 
estimate of their influence is apt to be commensurate 
with the fact. 

In a history of the Methodist Church in America 
the Methodist Book Concern would naturally fill 
an important chapter, and even in the discussion of 



From Small Beginnings [83 

the influence of the early Methodist preachers upon 
the genius and growth of the republic we must give 
more than a passing glance to an agency so indis- 
solubly connected with the very life of the Meth- 
odist Church. The Book Concern was the first ex- 
pression of a conviction that the permanence of the 
work of the pioneers of Methodism must depend 
largely upon the distribution of wholesome litera- 
ture. This earliest auxiliary agency of the church 
came into existence at the famous Christmas Con- 
ference in 1784. In pursuance of a plan to estab- 
lish a publishing house, to serve as an adjunct to 
the church, the Rev. John Dickins was appointed 
in 1789 to act as book steward, and with six hun- 
dred dollars of borrowed capital he commenced 
operations at No. 50 North Second Street, near 
Arch Street, in Philadelphia. 

In a list of the books published by John Dickins 
were several biographies, the first volume of Francis 
Asbury's Journal, several of John Fletcher's works, 
several sets of sermons, as many more volumes of 
serious books for the young, the experiences and 
travels of Mr. Freeborn Garrettson, Thomas a 
Kempis, and Baxter's Saints' Rest. Some of these 
books are classical ; one or two may still be found 
upon booksellers' shelves, and all were of a lofty and 
elevating tone. For general literary character it is 
probable that John Dickins's book list would bear 



1 84 



Nation Builders 



comparison with most modern publishers' cata- 
logues. 

From such a small beginning the Methodist Book 
Concern, the largest and probably the oldest active 
publishing house in America, has sprung, Dickins's 
advertisement contained this clause : "As the profits 
of these books are for the general benefit of the 
Methodist societies, it is humbly recommended that 
they will purchase no books which we publish of 
any other person than the aforesaid John Dickins, 
or the Methodist ministers and preachers in the sev- 
eral circuits, or such persons as sell them by their 
consent/' 

The acorn planted by John Dickins has grown 
into a mighty oak, but the character of the mature 
plant is the same that was shown in the embryo. 
The few dollars eked out of the profits of the Phil- 
adelphia house have grown to more than a hundred 
thousand annually, and the little book list has 
stretched into the thousands. Hundreds of worn- 
out Methodist preachers are passing the evening 
of consecrated lives in serenity and safety because 
of the magnificent success of their great publishing 
house. The contribution of the Book Concern for 
the support of superannuated ministers carries with 
it no taint or suspicion of charity. It is part of the 
great institution to which every Methodist preacher 
gives his life without question and without reserve, 



From Small Beginnings 185 



and its assistance is his right when his hands are 
feeble and the twilight of his life is drawing near. 

The number of tracts, pamphlets, leaflets, and 
periodicals of all sorts that have been issued by the 
Book Concern in its career of more than a century 
is almost beyond computation. The value of the 
distribution of this vast material, in the formation 
of character and the reclaiming of men from care- 
lessness and immorality to higher standards of 
thought and action, can never be expressed in finite 
terms. 



CHAPTER XI 

The Methodist Church and the Union 

The close bond that has always existed between 
the Methodist Church in America and the Federal 
Union was not only illustrated, however uncon- 
sciously, by the ministers and laymen of that church 
during the formative period of our national life, 
but at a later day was exemplified by millions of 
Methodists when the Union was threatened with 
disruption. 

Greatest of all the momentous questions that have 
moved both church and state to their foundations, 
the political differences that in 1861 finally led to 
civil war roused to enthusiasm the minds of a great 
host of citizens whose consciences were already 
trained to obedience to the demands of duty. No- 
where in the world could be found so large a 
body of men similarly trained as in the Methodist 
Church, and it is with no surprise that we discover 
that no body of men, in the North or in the South, 
contributed so largely to the strength of their re- 
spective armies as did the Methodists. 

The casting vote for or against the Union lay at 
that time in several of the border states with the 



Methodist Church and the Union 187 

Methodist societies. Had the membership of this 
church decided against the Union, they were numer- 
ically strong enough to have swung their states in 
line with the secession. That they did not do so 
was due in great part, we believe, to the efforts of 
certain leaders whose words and works embody 
both the enthusiasm and the conservatism of 
patriotism. 

We have already spoken in another chapter of 
Dr. George Richard Crooks. As editor of the 
Methodist he supported the Union cause with such 
effect that, to quote again from Dr. William F. 
Anderson, "the church owes him a large debt of 
gratitude for the influence he exerted upon the 
Methodists of the border states. He really saved 
that portion of the country to the church and to the 
Union. " 

With the unfortunate split between the Methodist 
Church South and North we have nothing to do. 
Happily many old differences, born of sectional 
prejudice, have long since healed, and the matters 
that a generation ago were of preeminent impor- 
tance to the citizen have now only a historic in- 
terest. This we know, that the whole body of 
Methodists, in all the land, threw their whole 
strength heartily into whichever cause they es- 
poused, for conscience' sake. 

The weight of Methodist influence has generally 



Nation Builders 



been exerted in opposition to slavery. From a very 
early time this disposition on the part of the church 
has been apparent. 

"In 1784/' says McMaster, "the cause of the 
negro for a time was popular. The Methodists 
took it up and bade every member of the society, 
where the law would permit, emancipate his slaves 
within a twelvemonth. Before a decade had gone 
by abolition societies had sprung up in Rhode Is- 
land, in Connecticut, in New Jersey, at New York, 
in Baltimore, in Virginia, at Washington, Pennsyl- 
vania, and even on Maryland's Eastern Shore." 

"The Methodists took it up." Can any statement 
be made which will more forcibly indicate the 
strength of Methodist influence even at that early 
day? 

* John Wesley was a firm and consistent opponent 
of slavery, in marked contrast to the theory and 
practice of Whitefield. With the views of Wesley 
the great Methodist leaders of America, with Dr. 
Coke at their head, heartily agreed. It is worthy 
of note that Dr. Coke and Bishop Asbury, charged 
with the presentation of a petition to Congress for 
the emancipation of all the slaves in America, went 
to George Washington, then at Mount Vernon, with 
the hope of obtaining his signature. Washington 
did not find it expedient to accede to the request of 
his reverend visitors, because he believed that such 



Methodist Church and the Union 189 

an exertion of his influence upon legislation was 
not compatible with his official position, but he ex- 
pressed his sympathy with their object, and told 
them that if Congress would take their petition into 
consideration he would then write a letter which 
would strengthen their hands. That the great ob- 
ject was not accomplished the country knows to its 
sorrow; but it is worth while to recollect that the 
first emancipation agitation began almost as soon as 
the government did, that it commenced in the South, 
and that the earliest agitators were the Methodist 
leaders. 

Marked was the contrast between Wesley and his 
followers in their ideal of human liberty and that 
of Whitefield, who argued for slavery in Georgia 
at a time when that pestilential institution was 
prohibited by the charter of the colony. Georgia 
was not originally a slave state, nor did its 
founders contemplate any such imposition upon its 
vitality. 

The contrast between Whitefield and Wesley, it 
may here be said, was the difference between a 
rocket and an arc light. Whitefield was a Calvinist 
whose Calvinism did not appear in his pyrotechnic 
progress through the American colonies. A very 
youthful, very earnest, and phenomenally eloquent 
preacher, he set the continent afire, and is univer- 
sally credited as the source of a mighty revival of 



190 Nation Builders 

religion which permeated all churches and led to the 
establishment of educational and other beneficent 
institutions. The result of Whitefield's work was 
far greater and stronger than his personality seemed 
to promise. He did not leave any new social on 
religious order as a monument to his genius or his 
faith. He was, essentially, a voice crying in the 
wilderness, and the voice, but for its immediate influ- 
ence, might have been absolutely impersonal. The 
attitude of Whitefield toward slavery is a blight 
upon his reputation. 

The persistence of Wesley's character, on the con- 
trary, is shown in the great society that bears his 
name and in the force and extension of his princi- 
ples even down to the present day. 

Dr, Coke preached emancipation till the neigh- 
boring population was up in arms. He was perse- 
cuted, forbidden to preach, even put in danger of 
assassination. Men who listened with indignation 
to his vehement demands that they should free their 
slaves met to waylay him, to put a summary end to 
such pernicious doctrines. Like all brave men, the 
pioneer abolitionist was never bolder or more de- 
cided than when he met with opposition. To know 
that an enemy was following him through the woods 
with a gun only drove him to more vehement and 
eloquent outbursts against slaveholding. Incident- 
ally, it is a pleasure to note that one particularly 



Methodist Church and the Union 191 

violent foe was afterward converted and became a 
good Methodist. 

A woman slave owner offered fifty pounds to any- 
one who would catch the Methodist leader and give 
him a hundred lashes. Again he was indicted by 
the grand jury and chased by several score men, 
who would have made short work of him if they had 
found him. 

The personality of Dr. Coke was displayed in 
many ways, in his long and arduous labors in Ire- 
land and in his impulsive offer to resign from the 
Methodist connection and accept the post of mission- 
ary bishop for Ceylon in the established church, if by 
so doing he could carry the gospel into India; but 
in none of the acts of his eventful life were his hu- 
manity and his heroism more characteristically dis- 
played than in his efforts for the abolition of slavery 
in America. 

The strength of the Methodist Church at various 
times has been vigorously directed against the "pe- 
culiar institution/' and at the outbreak of the civil 
war the majority of its communicants were opposed 
to its continuance. 

It is not too much to say that the influence of the 
Methodist connection has always been among the 
foremost factors that have worked for the mainte- 
nance of those ideals and those standards that we 
call American. In all great movements the attitude 



192 



Nation Builders 



of a great, conservative, conscientious body such as 
this is of vital importance to the nation and to 
mankind. 

Another view of the value of Methodism to the 
English-speaking nations has been presented by W. 
T. Stead, who, in regarding American Methodism 
from an Englishman's standpoint, sees in it the 
promise of more perfect and continuous unity be- 
tween Great Britain and the United States. He 
savs : 

"From the standpoint of those who, like our- 
selves, regard the unity of the English-speaking 
people as one of the supreme ends of modern pol- 
itics, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of 
John Wesley and his work. In the most energetic 
denomination in the United States he created a new 
tie between the empire and the republic. Millions 
upon millions of Americans regard Epworth and 
Fetter Lane, the Foundry and City Road, as the 
Mecca and Medina of their faith. Carlyle said that 
Shakespeare, by his genius, had unified the English- 
speaking world. We are all united, he said, in 
allegiance to King Shakespeare. But that which 
Shakespeare could not do, in that millions never 
read or see his plays, John Wesley has done with 
much effect. Among the influences which create 
a sense of unity among our English folk, that of 
John Wesley stands very nearly in the first rank. 



Methodist Church and the Union 193 

Neither Knox nor Cromwell affects the lives of so 
many men and women who are toiling and working 
all around us to-day as does John Wesley. There 
are nigh upon thirty millions of English-speaking 
men who view the next life through Wesley's spec- 
tacles and whose round of daily duty is directly 
affected by the rules and regulations of the great 
Methodist saint— the Ignatius Loyola of the English 
church." 

This utterance, though somewhat apart from the 
main argument of this book, is yet in line with it. 
It points to an influence so great as to take rank 
with the most stupendous movements of history, an 
influence transcending that of John Knox and com- 
mensurate with that of Luther and Paul. These 
are bold claims, but they need no defense, since the 
proof of them is spread wide upon the pages of his- 
tory, and he who runs may read. 



CHAPTER XII 



The After- Word 

In the foregoing pages we have tried to note the 
proem of American Methodism. The materials for 
it have frequently been hidden away in outworn and 
neglected biographies or merely notched in the cal- 
endars of the Conferences, but the traditions and 
legends linger yet along the valleys of the Ohio, 
among the Cumberland hills, beside the banks of the 
Wabash and the Tennessee, like the fragments of 
a great epic, and the chronicler who catches the 
dying echoes is thrilled by the militant sound of 
the American crusade. 

The saddlebag men of the wilderness were not 
pastors to lead their flocks beside still waters. They 
were heroes and witnesses. Without the learning 
that we commonly associate with the clerical pro- 
fession, without any academic bias or scholastic 
bent, they were nevertheless filled with understand- 
ing and fired by an enthusiasm that fused and 
illumined. 

We know that in singleness of purpose they strove 
for the advancement of that faith which they be- 
lieved to be the one essential to true living. If we 



The After- Word 



195 



study their records with minds open to the signifi- 
cance of historic truth we know what they never 
comprehended, that they were working no less truly 
and no less effectively in the providence of the Cre- 
ator for the establishment of the Union which has 
grown to be the synonym for all that is best in the 
social and political fabric of their country. 

The life of the Methodist Church as a power in the 
world has not depended primarily upon its splendid 
organization nor upon the ability and faithfulness 
of its great leaders, but upon its vital, unswerv- 
ing faith in a divine power working for the salva- 
tion of man. Without this sublime confidence in 
the miraculous initiative the lives of the Methodist 
itinerants would have been impossible. It seems 
as though he who runs must read in their uncon- 
scious achievement no less than in their conscious 
labor the guidance of Omnipotent Power. 

We are giving the record of the toilers of the fron- 
tier Methodist Church — the simple, single-hearted 
zealous body of primitive Christians who struggled 
and wept, suffered and sang on their journey to the 
celestial city — as a suggestion for study in a field 
of American history that has been little regarded, 
To Theodore Roosevelt alone among authors of 
general works relating to American history we may 
give the credit for recognition of the work of the 
Methodist itinerants as pioneers of the republic. 



196 



Nation Builders 



The record is one of a generation that has passed 
away. We call the roll of great men, great in hu- 
manity, courage, zeal, eloquence, and faith. What 
unfaltering voices answer from the depths of the 
forest where they laid down their lives ! From cane- 
brake and mountain and morass they answer: As- 
bury, Coke, Burke, Bascom, Lee, Bangs, Bigelow, 
Cartwright, Taylor — by tens, by hundreds, by thou- 
sands they gather, a great multitude of heroes, who 
manfully played their part and sacrificed their lives 
for the sake of the faith that was in them. 

They laid broad the foundations of the social 
order in regions where without them all would have 
been anarchy. They stood shoulder to shoulder 
through long years of privation, danger, fatigue, 
and suffering, never falling back, never refusing the 
odds of battle, fighting manfully, like good soldiers 
of the cross. The roughness, the minor faults, the 
eccentricities that marked them kin to the humanity 
around them, have been rounded off and smoothed 
away by the hand of time, and their virtues stand 
out resplendent. As Americans, whatever creed we 
profess, we must honor among our greatest and our 
best those grand Americans of the earlier day — the 
pioneer preachers of Methodism, 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2006 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



